Guild Wars Mirror Universe
by LilithDeStriga
Summary: The Mirror Universe, 1070 AE. A world where black is white, left is right, and right is wrong. An ancient cult dedicated to Mad King Thorn stands finds its last bastion in the Kingdom of Ascalon. The charr stand ready to sear it off the face of the earth, secretly under the command of a slumbering god from eons past. Abaddon and his allies find an unlikely friend in Thorn.
1. Lilith de Nemo

_Author's Note: I am republishing this here from my blog at .com. The blog actually has several more chapters already available, and I have been updating it daily since it began about a week ago, so that's something. The reason why I use the blog instead of as my primary platform for updates is mostly that the blog allows picture support and I use occasional screenshots from the game as illustrations. I'll be keeping both updated, though, so check whichever one works better for you._

Baron Egan woke up early as a general rule. Lilith was not Baron Egan. On this particular day, Egan had decided to visit the Roblis Estate, which meant that the Roblis' two kitchen slaves had to be up early to prepare breakfast early for Egan's visit. Lilith wasn't a kitchen slave. The head slave had to be up in order to supervise the kitchen slaves. Lilith wasn't the head slave either. If the head slave was going to be up, he was damn well going to make sure that every other slave would be up, standing around doing nothing with their heads bowed in an ostentatious display of conspicuous consumption when the Baron arrived. And that's why Lilith was trying not to fall asleep on her feet when it was barely even light out and the Baron was taking breakfast with Sir and Lady Roblis and their eldest son, along with a half-dozen other slaves who had absolutely nothing to do for another hour, which was when the day usually began.

In an effort to keep herself awake, Lilith was concentrating very carefully on what the nobles were saying. "It's the Royalists, you know," Baron Egan said in his deep, voice. "They're hardly better than bandits themselves, you know, trying to drive the kingdom into the gutter for the sake of their barbaric ways." Lilith had long ago learned to avoid voicing her disagreement, especially not in the company of an esteemed guest like the Baron. She'd like as not be beheaded for being that bold. But she made a mental note to make sure the whole Roblis family paid for their disdain when she took her place in the Lunatic Court.

"I couldn't agree more," Sir Roblis said, "as if we haven't got enough problems with the Charr coming down south. Have you heard?"

"Oh, yes," Egan said, "the warband that broke through the frontlines, you mean? Headed south to the Wall. They'll fair about as well as all the others, of course."

"Oh, of course," Sir Roblis said, "to be honest I'm more worried about that devourers' nest. I've heard tell that a new breed is growing there, lethally poisonous."

"Hm, Duke Gaban should look into it," Baron Egan said, "if he's not too busy feeding his slaves to the beasts. He spends so much time up there just listening to the screams of the ones who displease him. Honestly, it's so very…Well, Lunatic."

"Oh, isn't it?" Lady Roblis spoke now, "what I wouldn't give to have so many slaves I could fritter them away on blood sport," she said the last words with clear disdain. The Lady was mostly silent as the men discussed politics, but quieter still was Sir Roblis' eldest child Edwin, a fifteen-year old boy who was doing a poor job of hiding the fact that he was ogling one of the larger-breasted slaves. As in every noble family, his parents disapproved of the notion of his being intimate with mere slaves, and as with every noble family his youthful vigor demanded immediate satisfaction rather than properly courting noble women who had the luxury of rejecting of him. Getting away with as much slave intimacy as possible without letting the parents find out was essentially an unofficial coming-of-age rite for noble boys. Lilith had escaped his attentions so far, as it seemed Edwin preferred older girls and she was only a year his senior. This was surely a blessing from a sympathetic Lunatic, Lilith thought, shielding one who was truly a noble from the harsher depravities of living as a slave.

"It does keep the slave population down," Sir Roblis continued on, "and I have suspected for some time that at least a few of those bandits are runaways."

"So it does, so it does," Egan said, "but there are much faster ways to get rid of excess slaves. A good beheading will do the trick much faster."

"I agree," Sir Roblis responded, "he could at least do us the favor of recovering the corpses, such that the monks at Ashford could examine the body. Perhaps find a way to cure that poison!"

"That poison seems to have you fearful," Egan said. Lilith knew something had Sir Roblis on edge for the past week solid, and she had the scars to prove it. The sooner someone or other dealt with this poison, the better.

"Oh, it's because of the time at the river when a rogue devourer attacked him. He was hardly more than a boy and it caught him unarmed and unarmored, oh, you should have seen the look on his face!" Lady Roblis said.

"M'lady, please, the Baron is hardly appropriate company for such talk," Sir Roblis said, but Baron Egan just laughed.

"Father, mother," Edwin said, speaking for the first time, "may I please be excused? I should like to be about my training." Edwin was hardly interested in training most days, preferring to drink with his friends, but it seemed preferable to him to enduring conversation between adults he was not permitted to insult.

"Edwin, we have company," Sir Roblis said.

"Oh, let him go," Egan insisted, "I will have more than enough time to get to know the boy before he takes over the estate, I'm sure. Unless you plan to hunt that devourer yourself, that is," he finished with a grin.

Sir Roblis forced a small smile at the joke, and said "very well, you are excused, Edwin."

"Thank you, father," the boy said, and rose to leave. He grabbed his plate and handed it off to the slave he'd been eyeing, and then made a poor show of stumbling into her, spilling the leftovers all over the both of them. "Gods be damned!" he said, a bit too angry as the porcelain plate shattered on the ground. "You'll learn to keep track of where your feet are," the boy began, but Sir Roblis cut him off.

"You get to the training field if you're so eager," Roblis said, "and quit making a scene in front of company." He turned towards Donnel and said "see about getting that plate replaced," and then returned to his conversation.

Donnel nodded to Sir Roblis and then scanned the waiting slaves. His gaze fell on Lilith, who quickly swallowed down a few of the plague locusts that had started crawling up her throat, suppressing a shudder. Letting a few of the bugs that crawled around inside her out of her mouth in the middle of dinner might be seen as something of a faux pax and she was already on thin ice from her delayed return the previous week, when Verata had showed her how to command the tiny creatures in the first place. Donnel handed her a small money pouch, wordless so as not to disturb the conversation, but the command was straightforward enough, and Lilith was glad of a reason to be anywhere else but sitting around doing nothing. She nodded to Donnel, and quietly slipped away from the room.

It was a general rule of the Roblis household that you did not buy anything from Ascalon City that you could get in Ashford. While it was true that the Roblis' were one of the families, much like the de Magi, who had grown wealthy under Adelbern's reign, but nevertheless Sir Roblis insisted that they hadn't gotten that way by frittering money away and refused to spend more than was absolutely necessary. Lilith did not especially mind. Trips to Ashford gave her time to herself, and besides, if Verata was going to find her again, surely it would be out here, on the same road he'd found her the first time.

Verata never had come for her, but there was something else Lilith looked forward to. Sarah de Luma tended the shrine, where wounded and weary nobles would be healed by the will of the king. Sarah herself was just another noble whose attention Lilith hoped to avoid, but her daughter Gwen had a flute that she loved to play. Lilith herself had played the flute before. It was one of the hobbies her parents had approved of, and for that she had come to resent it a bit. She had since come to see this as more than a bit silly. Why should she care what some money-grubbing businessmen should think of her hobbies? She didn't care when they disapproved of her dabbling in the dark arts, why should she care when they did approve of her playing the flute? It was all a bit late for this sort of self-awareness now, but she'd remember when she was a noble again.

There was no flute music today, though. Lilith "accidentally" spilled the contents of the coin pouch, bending over to pick them up while looking towards the shrine. There was Sarah, manning her post as she did every day. Gwen was often out of sight, up a tree somewhere, and she'd sit in a branch and play her music. But not today. Maybe she was sick, or had some other business to attend? Sometimes Gwen wasn't there with her mother. Lilith certainly wasn't about to ask Sarah where she was. She had enough troubles without going looking for more.

But there was Gwen now, not playing but moping. Lilith glanced back down towards the ground, gathering up the coins. Gwen was most likely worrying over something trivial, as ten year olds do. By this time tomorrow she'd be back to playing her flute. Lilith would hear her the next time she was sent to Ashford. Possibly Gwen would be playing by the time she came back. The sensible thing to do was certainly to just ignore it. Gwen wasn't her problem.

So why was she walking towards the girl, instead of away?

"What's wrong?" Lilith asked, crouching down besides the girl.

Gwen looked towards her, inching backwards, her eyes widening slightly. "Who are you?" she asked.

"A friend," Lilith said, "why don't you tell me what's wrong? Maybe I can help."

"I don't need a slave's help," Gwen said.

"I-I'm, that's not," Lilith begin, and then composed herself. "Can you keep a secret?" she asked. Gwen nodded, her expression still suspicious. "I'm not really a slave. I'm a Royalist witch disguised as a slave, so no one notices me coming or going. I'm on an important mission now, but I can always make time to lend a hand to good little Lunatics. You are a Lunatic, aren't you?"

"Of course!" Gwen said, "the de Luna family have supported Prince Rurik since the day he was born!" Lilith smiled. She'd known the answer in advance, of course, the political allegiances of most of the noble families being fairly common knowledge amongst the nobility, which she had been a member of hardly more than a year before. And would be again someday soon.

"Then tell me what's wrong," Lilith said, "have you been teased by some boy who'd be better off as a frog?"

"No, it's…It's my flute," Gwen said, "I was playing near the river, and some skale came out of the water and ran at me, and I ran away and dropped it, and they're still there and I can't get it back."

"That won't be hard. Follow me," Lilith said, and stood. Gwen hesitated. "Don't be scared," Lilith said, "we'll just be going to the river to get your flute. I need you to show me where it was you dropped it, is all."

Gwen hesitated a bit longer, but then said "okay," and got up. Lilith said "I'll need to get my wand first," and turned and began walking to where she had it hidden in the reeds at the riverbank. She hoped this didn't take long, now that her sense was beginning to catch up with the rest of her. She was already on thin ice from her delayed return the previous week, when Verata had taught her. But surely, if she took care of this quickly, and rushed the rest of the errand, it would hardly be noticed she was late. If she slipped in five minutes or ten minutes later than usual, she might be punished, but it wouldn't be considered unusual.

By the time she had arrived at her wand's hiding place, she was short on breath from having broken into a run about halfway there. Gwen could barely keep up on her short legs. All of Lilith's doubts seemed easier to quiet once she felt the thorned wood of the wand again. This was power, dark power, the power she was meant for. So long as she wielded this, Lilith thought, surely nothing could go too horribly wrong. "Now where'd you leave your flute?" Lilith asked.

The skale were spread thin when Lilith arrived, but as she waded into the river they began to cluster up, hissing at her and baring their teeth. She could feel the power of death flowing through her and into the wand, the burst of dark energy slamming into a skale with a shriek. There was no sign of any wound, for the magic did not pierce the flesh like an arrow might. Instead, it enervated, draining the very life from the creature. The pack charged, and Lilith called up the swarm inside her. Out from her mouth, ears, and nostrils the plague locusts swarmed, tiny pestilent insects climbing out of her tear ducts and across her eyes before flying towards the enemy. Her ragged clothes writhed as the creatures crawled from her teats and groin, and from beneath her fingernails still more came, flying to the skale and devouring those in lead of the pack. They stripped flesh from bone at an amazing pace, leaving only a few ragged clumps clinging to their bodies as their rancid husks fell into the river.

Most turned to flee, but one pounced upon her, bowling her to the ground and submerging her head. Its jaws found purchase on her shoulders, while its claws scraped at her chest, but her wand arm was unharmed. A single blast from the wand and the creature reared back, Lilith erupting from the river and wrapping her hands around its shoulders. Fangs slid from her lips and she bit down into the creature, her own wounds sealing themselves up as she drank deep from the creature's jugular. Finally, she dropped the dry corpse into the river. A few rivulets of blood trailed down her legs to be swept away in the current below.

Lilith recalled with a start that she was in a hurry. She had no idea how long she'd zoned out, but the sun seemed to be in the same position so it couldn't have been too long. Gwen stood and stared from her position near the bank. Lilith pulled her feet from the sucking mud and onto the banks of the river. "Did you find your flute?" Lilith asked. Gwen still just stared, and muttered something. Lilith snapped her fingers in front of Gwen, and said "hey, are you in there?" Gwen blinked and looked up towards her. "Don't worry, it's over. Did you find your flute?"

"Oh, it's…It's around here somewhere," Gwen said, climbing down the bank and into the river.

A minute or two later, Gwen shrieked and backed away, her searching feet having stumbled across not the flute, but one of the skale corpses in the river. "Don't worry," Lilith said, "it's dead. It can't hurt you." Gwen swallowed and nodded, wading away from the corpse as she continued searching. Lilith's own feet curled around something thin and round, and she thought she could feel the holes in it, too. Pulling it from foot to hand, the current washing the mud away, she found the flute…Or rather, half of it.

"It's broken?" Gwen asked.

"Looks like," Lilith said.

"It was all for nothing?" Gwen asked again, "the flute is broken?"

"It was good practice," Lilith said, "and more importantly, revenge. Show them to mess with the de Luma, right?"

It was the first time Lilith had seen Gwen smile up close. "Right," she said. Gwen looked at her a moment, and looked back towards the dead skale. "They're not so scary once they've stopped moving," she said, and then began wading out of the river.


	2. A Gift For Althea

Prince Rurik was in Ashford Village. Being that he was not surrounded by an impressive entourage, nor anyone at all besides a single companion, and his armor was the crimson of his Vanguard rather than the gilded steel that denoted his rank, it could safely be assumed that he intended to go unrecognized. Lilith knew his face, though. She had seen him at royal balls and festivals, and though the de Magi family had declined to introduce their black sheep to him (and thank Thorn for that, for if they had she might be recognized by him now and die of shame), she had practically worshiped him. The blood of Thorn, who would restore the proud line of the Lunatic Kings. Perhaps, she thought with a smile, he would see her true nature past the ignoble facade forced upon her by Adelbern's supporters, and struck by her regal demeanor and and beauty would take her at once to be his queen.

"Lovely, isn't she?" Rurik said, and Lilith squeaked and jumped half a foot off the ground.

"As lovely as the day is long, m'lord," his companion said, and Lilith quietly thanked whatever Lunatic Courtier happened to be watching that the Prince paid no attention to her reaction. They weren't talking about her, because of course they were talking about the Prince's actual fiancee, the duchess Althea de Barradin. From the lofty perspective of the Prince, Lilith's former position in the nobility was hardly more than common. Her return to the nobility and revenge on those who wronged her was destiny, but Rurik sweeping her off her feet was just a fantasy. "Have you set a date for the wedding?" Rurik's companion continued.

"Not yet," Rurik said, "but I've got a more pressing problem, believe it or not," and Lilith managed to shake herself free of the spell that had fallen on her, stop staring, and get moving again. She and Rurik had never spoken, but she had seen him, and perhaps he had seen her, and she turned her head to the side for fear of being recognized. In any case, averting their gaze from lords was what slaves did, and there was no point in abandoning the act now. The time was hardly opportune to make her move.

"More pressing than your wedding? What could that possibly be?" Rurik's companion asked.

"Her birthday," Rurik said, "it's coming up even sooner than the wedding, and I haven't got a gift for her."

"What about that scepter from your treasuries?" his companion asked, "the one with that ghastly curse. She is so fond of those things. I thought you had settled on giving her that weeks ago."

"As cursed items go, it is excellent," Rurik said, "but not perfect. And did you see what she got me for mine?"

"I did," his companion said, nodding his head. Lilith could remember as well, the three dancing girls all melded together. That would be hard to top.

"Then you realize that some cursed scepter won't be enough," Rurik said, "it must be something more exceptional than that, more...More gruesome. And with everything else going on up north I hardly have the time to think about it."

"I understand your predicament, m'lord," his companion said, "leave it to me."

Rurik smiled. "Truly I could not ask for a better friend. I wish you well in your search."

"Thank you, m'lord, I shall not disappoint. Nor shall I waste anymore time!" He gave a slight bow and he and Rurik parted ways. "You, there!" the man called out. Lilith froze, turned about, looked behind her hoping he might be talking to someone other than her. He wasn't about to ask her to find a gift that could match up to three dancing girls stitched together, was he? Or...He wasn't going to make her into such a gift? "Yes, you, come here, hurry up," he demanded. Lilith swallowed and walked to him. He pulled her head back, examining the mark behind her ear, the house arms of the de Roblis family. He released her with a shove, and said "whatever errand you're on for Sir Roblis, I am Lord Osric and mine takes precedence." He displayed his signet ring, an emblem of his higher station. "Find me a gift suitable for a noble lady, something macabre. If you can't find a present, you'll be part of it. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Lilith responded.

"Then get going," he said, and left at a brisk pace, probably to seek out other slaves to pressgang into his search. If one of the others found a suitable gift, would they all be spared being made into something more suitable? Or would all those who failed be punished regardless? How could Lilith find a gift better than what a lord might make out of her?

Lilith took a deep breath and stopped to think. She wasn't some slave raised in a gutter with mud for blood. Her understanding of the macabre wasn't just "something spooky," she was a noble and she understood the artistry behind this sort of thing. If Osric thought a random slave could find something suitable rather than just making a coat out of her on the spot, surely she could exceed his expectations by a wide margin. She'd find him something truly grotesque, yet also beautiful. All she had to do is take stock of what she had at her disposal and how to twist it into something unique. She could spare a good deal of blood from her own body for starters, and there were plenty of living things about. Skale were hardly an appropriate sacrifice to someone as powerful as Althea, but perhaps some medley of carnage? She could find some grawl, and a bandit wouldn't be missed. If she could find a way to snag something valuable before it came to market it probably wouldn't be reported as-

And someone was grabbing her by the arm, turning her to face them. The owner of the hand that had grabbed her was a blonde woman with a hammer slung over her shoulder, whom Lilith distantly recalled was the new captain of the Ashford Guard, the old one having been summoned to hunt down the pack of Charr that had broken through the frontlines and were pillaging towards the Wall. Lilith winced as the captain yanked her head to one side by the hair so that the captain could examine Roblis' arms, and wished that these people would just ask her to tilt her head to one side. She knew where the brand was. "I need a message delivered," the captain said, "take this to Meerak the Scribe in Ashford Abbey." She handed Lilith a sealed envelope. "The message instructs him to send a response to me immediately. Carry that message back to me. Understood?"

"Please, miss, I'm already on an errand for Lord-" Lilith began.

"I don't care," the captain said, "this is an urgent mission for the King's own guard of Ashford, we take precedence over any noble. If you don't have the message delivered I'll cave your skull in as an example to the next messenger I find!"

Lilith swallowed. "Yes, miss, I'll deliver it right away," she said.

"Then get going!" the captain said, and Lilith broke into a run towards Ashford Abbey, hoping that if she moved fast enough no one else would waylay her and pile on even more errands on her. She was nearly to the Abbey when she stopped again, this time not by any nosy nobles or officers, but by a moa bird. Lilith was no rancher, but she had studied the crafting of quills briefly, so that she could make her own from raven's feathers instead of using the atrociously gaudy abominations her parents bought, made from distant paradise birds. Even from only scant study, though, she knew the feathers on this beast would make for a fine quill indeed. Its feathers were golden and tinged with various hues of red. Some of them a gorgeous blood red. But it was the gold ones that would suit Althea, Lilith thought as she stroked the magnificent creature's feathery coat, seeing as how the gold accents on her wardrobe were near ubiquitous. Maybe if she could find some proper, deep purple parchment to go with it...Were there any animals whose skin would fit?

This rancher almost certainly had an agreement with quillmakers to sell any feathers it shed to them. Looking at the floor of the pen, Lilith found most of the feathers were already trampled and useless. Probably the good ones had already been snatched by the farmer. But there was more than one way to skin a moa.

Lilith fled from the pen, the furious moa screeching and chasing after her. She hopped the fence and continued sprinting at full tilt, feather clutched by its point in her hands, trying not to ruin the plume as she ran from both the moa and its owner. Had she been seen? She did not plan to stick around long enough to find out. Not until she reached Ashford Abbey did she stop to catch her breath.


	3. Unsettling Rumors

The interior of Ashford Abbey was a bright ray of light surrounded by a stuffy gloom. Somehow, whether it was magic or clever architecture, the sunlight that streamed in from the high window down onto the desk where Abbot Mhenlo sat working did nothing to dispel the impenetrable darkness that clouded the rest of the building. "Excuse me, sir," Lilith said, standing in the shadow. The Abbot did not respond. "I have a message for Meerak the Scribe from captain of the Ashford Guard. She says it's urgent, sir."

"He's outside," Mhenlo pointed with a spare hand and did not look up from his work.

"Yes, sir," Lilith said, and scurried towards the door. The massive oak required a fair amount of pulling to open even the foot and a half Lilith needed to slip out, which it did with a thunderous creak. Outside, Lilith found the only one who looked like he might be a monk. He was dressed in the proper robes, but didn't seem to be doing anything more vital than taking a walk. "Excuse me, sir, I have a message for Meerak the Scribe?"

"That's me," Meerak said, extending his hand to accept the letter. Lilith handed it to him, thinking it odd that the monk of the Abbey who seemed who wasn't doing any paperwork was the one with the title "scribe." Meerak scanned the lines of the letter and Lilith bowed her head, waiting for him to finish and trying not to give him any excuse to harm her in the meantime. The monks of Ascalon were famous for their inventive torture, and it was common knowledge among slaves that you did not give them an excuse to practice on you. Lilith hardly breathed as Meerak scanned the letter, and then he wandered off without a word. Lilith glanced about herself. Was he composing a message? Should Lilith wait? Or should she be trying to construct a gift for Althea? If Meerak had a response, she'd be punished for not delivering, but if he didn't, she ran risk of being punished, possibly with _death_, for failing to complete Osric's errand. In fact, if Meerak had no response she ran risk of being punished anyway since the captain of the Ashford Guard likely wouldn't believe her when she said Meerak didn't respond. Lilith bit on her lip and considered her options, and that consideration was steadily crowded out by a growing notion of how _unfair_ it was to make someone with noble blood put up with this, when the only crime she'd ever committed was to act like a proper noble and not a common money-grubbing burgher like her parents, who disgraced the whole de Magi name.

Fortunately, her counter-productive brooding was interrupted by Meerak's return. "Here, give this to Armin Saberlin," he said, thrusting a message into her hands, "he must know immediately what I have seen!"

"But I need a response for the Ashford Guard, not the warmarshal," Lilith said.

"Never mind the petty guards!" Meerak said, "this is urgent news, and must reach the capital immediately!"

"I, uh," Lilith bit her lip and thought better of further complaint. He was, after all, a _monk_. "Yes, sir," she said, bowing slightly and turning to leave.

"Wait," Meerak said, and Lilith hesitated, shot through with fear. "Good luck. If what I have foreseen is true, you will need it. We all will."

"Um…Thanks," Lilith said, entirely uncertain as to what he meant. "I mean, thank you, sir," she said, "may I go?"

"Yes, go!" Meerak demanded, and Lilith ran for the gate, glad to be gone from the Abbey.

She took a detour to the other side of Ashford, where the guardhouse was. As she approached, she saw to her relief that the guard captain still manned her post outside it. "Madam guard captain," she said, offering the message from Meerak, "this is the only response Meerak the Scribe gave me, it's-" the guard captain snatched it away, "it's for Armin Saberlin, miss." The captain checked the writing on the back, addressing it to Armin Saberlin, and then shrugged and cracked open the seal on it, looking over the contents.

After a while, the captain scowled and said "he'd best not continue stirring up trouble in my town because of some mad crock about visions. Take it to the warmarshal."

"B-but miss," Lilith began, "the seal." If Saberlin thought she'd broken it, there was no worming her way out of it. She'd be _killed_. She'd die as some ignoble slave. She'd never get the justice she deserved for everything that happened to her. She'd never live another day of her life without being terrified of what others might do to her.

"What about it?" the guard captain demanded.

"Please miss," Lilith said, falling to her knees; she was more than used to outward displays of humility by now. "Please, add a note, just a single line to explain it was you who broke the seal, for official purposes. Please, he'll kill me for a spy if you don't, you can use a dagger and my blood as the ink so you don't even have to bother sending me to fetch a quill."

The captain sighed with frustration. Her boot slammed into Lilith's face, she went sprawling to the ground, and blood trickled down from her split lip. "If you die, that's the Roblis' problem," she said, "explain what happened to Saberlin yourself, and if you _don't_, I promise I shall come to the de Roblis estate and invoke my right to kill you."

Lilith ran. She sucked in a deep breath. Deep inside, she wanted to sob, but she refused. She had always refused, for the past year. When first she was sold, she thought she could retain her pride and her dignity, refuse to humiliate herself for her new owners. But the trainers had beaten that out of her in a hurry. And in retrospect, it was foolish of her to try. As though a single girl of merely noble blood could simply defy Adelbern's injustices into submission, when Prince Rurik, of the blood of Thorn himself, could do nothing more than criticize them, shore them up, lend support to their enemies…But never oppose them directly.

But there was one thing they couldn't take from her. They could make her _pretend_ to be a slave. They could take her pride and her dignity. They could make her beg for food. They could make her insult herself for their amusement. They could make her thank them for punishing her. But they couldn't make her cry. Couldn't make her admit defeat to herself. Couldn't make her forget that despite the show she put on, she was still a noble, and it was her family who muddied their name by placing greed before honor and duty, and some day that injustice would be rectified. So she took a few more deep breaths and calmed herself, and resolved that she wasn't going to cry or walk meekly to the chopping block. She would find some way of convincing Saberlin, or of preventing the captain from claiming her life if she did not deliver the message, or _something_. She may have been bent to their will, but she was _not_ broken. And she never would be.

Composed again, Lilith set out walking towards Ascalon City, but it soon occurred to her that she should avoid Saberlin for as long as possible. Delivering a message late would see her merely beaten. Delivering it unsealed would see her killed. She really should put off delivering the message for as long as possible. She sat down and examined the message itself. How much room was there to add explanations in the first place? Could she forge the captain's explanation? And so long as it was already unsealed…What did it say?

_Warmarshal Armin Saberlin_, the letter began.

_I must report to you the most dire of all possible news. You know me to be of the faith of the Lunatic Court, and yet I have received a vision from Dwayna. Do not be confused into thinking me a heretic, for it came as much a surprise to me as to you, and understand that for the Marutuk to contact me, this must be either very desperate for advantage against a common foe or else attempting some artifice. I am not a strategist, and thus I entrust the complete contents of my vision to you, our greatest general, that you might puzzle out whether this is war making for strange bedfellows or simply a ploy._

_In this vision, Dwayna showed me a massive cauldron that the charr were carrying into Ascalon. This, she told me, was the Cauldron of Cataclysm that destroyed the Crystal Sea completely a thousand years ago. Then my spirit and hers moved across the land at great speed until we were far to the north, in the barbaric homelands of the charr, where she showed me a great fiery beast. This, she said, was a titan, a rebel against the god Abaddon, who created the Cauldron of Cataclysm so long ago. This titan rebel was worshiped by the charr. Then we flew again at great speed, and she showed me a great slumbering beast, that had slept for so long that the earth itself had covered it. This, she said, was one of the five heads of Tiamat which she and her companions had cut off so long ago, and in the millenia since, it had twisted itself into the shape of five new beasts of terrifying power. The rebel titans, Dwayna said, sought to revive this creature, and to that end they would use the charr as pawns to call down a great catastrophe on Ascalon that would destroy us as utterly as the Margonites were destroyed. With us out of the way, the charr would be free to move through the Crystal Desert to Orr and raze Arah, destroying the Marutuk's stronghold in Tyria so that they would not be able to strike down the five heads of Tiamat as they rose._

_I pray to the Lunatic Court that this dire vision is naught but a deceit meant to distract us, and yet truly I fear that it is not. I trust that you, warmarshal, shall be able to determine the truth of things one way or the other._

_Yours faithfully,_

_Meerak the Scribe_

"You there!" someone behind her said, and Lilith screamed and folded up the letter and spun around. The man in front of her was dressed common. The burghers were fond of showing off their wealth, so this man was probably just a peasant.

"Yes, sir?" Lilith asked. Because peasants still outranked slaves.

"My hogs have got loose," he said, "I need help rounding them up."

"I'm not _your_ slave, sir," Lilith said, "I belong to the de Roblis family."

"Aye, but these are the king's pigs," he said, "I sell my pork straight to Adelbern. Best pigs in the kingdom, mine are. And the way I see it, when the king's pigs need rounding up, the king's slaves have got to do their part, and all the slaves belong to the king, don't they?"

"Well, yes," Lilith said, "legally speaking the de Roblis are stewards. But that doesn't mean some random peasant can order me around just because you sell to the king." Dirk smacked her across the face, and Lilith yelped. "Technically, that isn't legal either," she said, rubbing at her stinging cheek, although the peasant and her both knew that the de Roblis family would never consider pressing charges unless some serious damage was done to their property.

"Listen here, missy," the farmer said, "if you don't do as you're told we'll have to take it up with the Ashford Guard, and there's only one of us what they can cut pieces off of for fun, isn't there?"

"Yeah, because you they'd be required by law to chop a hand off of for theft," Lilith said, "I know what the laws are, and I have work to do, now leave me alone or _I'll_ call the guards." Or else summon a swarm to devour him. Either way, really.

The farmer scowled, his bluff called, and Lilith turned and began walking away. She should focus on finding a gift for Althea. She could make the feather into a quill with a few tools, she could probably find those in a workshop here in Ashford, all she had to do was slip in while no one was looking. Making a single quill is something she could manage in an hour, which wasn't so bad in terms of getting things to Osric on time but who abandoned their workshop for an hour in the middle of the day? "Missy, wait," the farmer said. Lilith ignored him. "Listen, I need your help, that bastard Orville has turned half the village against me and bullied the other half into leaving me abandoned, and now _someone_, though I shouldn't make any spurious accusations, has let the little beauties loose! Wild skale would love to snack on them, or the local stalkers even, they wander near town sometime." Did Melandru's Stalkers even live around here? The big cats weren't on the list of things that tried to murder travelers, so Lilith didn't really keep track of their population. Either way, Lilith just kept walking and hoped that the farmer tried something stupid so she could call the guards on him. "No one respectable will lend me a hand, but see, no offense missy, but seeing as how you're already a slave, that don't much matter to you, does it?" Regrettably it was perfectly legal to go on harassing her all day. At least he was being nice about it now. "And I'll bet even a common farmer like me could offer you more money than you see in a month for a bit of help. Won't take longer than half an hour!"

"Any money you give me is property of Sir Roblis," Lilith said, "I can't own property." She wasn't sure if explaining her lack of rights was better or worse when the person she was explaining to seemed genuinely unaware.

"If I put coins in your hand, and you spend them saying it's on his orders, and then enjoy yourself some nice meal while you're out in the village, what are the laws going to do to stop you?" the farmer asked.

Lilith stopped and thought about it. It was a good point and she kicked herself for not thinking about it earlier. Maybe she would've been more open-minded about it if he hadn't started by trying to bluff his way into forcing her to help, "How much?" Lilith asked.

"I'll give you ten gold," the farmer said.

"Ten? I'll take fifty and still only have enough for a cheap dye," Lilith said.

The farmer barked out a laugh. "Aye, but do you see any dyed clothes on you or me? Twenty gold will buy you three good meals, and I mean _good_ meals, and that's plenty for an hour's work."

"An hour's work and a whipping that'll stick for a month," Lilith said, declining to mention that she was already an hour late, and so long as she was back by sunset things were unlikely to get much worse. "Plus, if these hogs are so great, each one is probably worth at least twenty gold by itself, so it's not like you wouldn't lose more without my help. Make it thirty."

"These hogs are my livelihood, missy. I give you more than twenty-five and I won't be able to keep food on my table while I raise the next litter," the farmer said.

Lilith considered a moment. What she actually needed the money for was a gift for Althea, and anything short of several thousand wouldn't let her just go out and _buy_ such a gift. Twenty-five, however, would likely be enough to acquire some tools without stealing them, which was liable to get her hand chopped off. Or her throat slit, if the guards were in a bad mood. "Okay, sure, twenty-five," Lilith said. "How do I know you'll pay me after we finish, though?"

"Because I'm a man of the land and a man of my word," the farmer said, looking offended, "to be honest I'm more worried about whether I can trust a slave not to just pick my pocket and run."

"I'm not a slave," Lilith said, "I mean, legally yes, but not _really_. I was born a noble, and my family sold me for spurious reasons. To any law-abiding subject of the Kingdom of Ascalon, my word is the highest guarantee there is, second only to that of royal proclamation."

"Aye, and surely no slave could ever tell a tale like that unless it were true?" the farmer said.

"I'm _not_ lying!" Lilith insisted, "I was a de Magi!"

"There's naught you can say that any slave couldn't say," the farmer said, "maybe you're lying and maybe you're not, but we both _know_ that I'm who I say I am. I'll give you the twenty-five we agreed to after my hogs are safe and sound."

Lilith quietly searched for something, some way to prove what she was saying, or some way to make him back down. But he was right, really. Now that Adelbern and his supporters were muddling the classes together, you couldn't really tell if slaves were dishonest, or for that matter if nobles were trustworthy. At least the peasants had been left alone. "Okay, you're right," Lilith said, "but you had better not go back on your word. I'm really _not_ supposed to be a slave. It's _wrong_, and…Please don't make it any worse."

"I told you once, missy," the farmer said, "my word's as solid as the land I work. The land you're standing on. Does it feel like it's going anywhere in a hurry?" He extended his hand to shake. Lilith took it. "I'm Angus. Angus Dirk."

"I'm Lilith," she said, shaking his hand "Lilith de Nemo, of course."

"Right, enough chatter, I'll search the west side, you search the east, and if you find one of them just chase them towards that pen over there," he pointed, "they're good pigs and should stick around so long as no one else comes to scare them out. Might be easier to pick them up and haul them back, but from the look of you, I don't think you'd be able to manage it."

"I'll find them," Lilith said, and turned immediately to round them up.


	4. Bees Get Organized

The hogs were mercifully still contained within the village, though Lilith did see what appeared to be what was _left_ of one of them down by the river banks, a few particularly nasty-looking skale pecking at the carcass. She decided against further investigation. Her breath was short by the time she had chased them all back into their pen, which, Lilith noted, looked like it was possibly a better place to sleep than _her_ pen. She hoped it was at least a _particularly nice_ pigs' pen.

Dirk was true to his word and handed her off all twenty-five gold, with which she was able to purchase the tools she needed to turn the feather into a quill. Now all she needed was an inkwell and some parchment and hopefully that would be good enough for Osric. And then she still had to find some way to get that message delivered to the warmarshal without losing her head...Maybe Osric could be persuaded to do her a favor if he liked the gift well enough? Unlikely, he was a powerful noble, he made whatever demands he liked on slaves, and he had no more reason than Dirk to believe she was a former noble. Maybe she could get a peasant, though? She hadn't realized until just now, but she could, in fact, bargain with them. But, how would a peasant convince the warmarshal of what had happened? Peasants were afforded a good deal more respect than slaves as the foundation of the kingdom, but being a peasant wasn't any protection from accusations of spying.

Every few minutes, Lilith glanced back towards the hiding spot where she had hidden the quill and the message. She was very good at finding hiding spots, seeing as how her ragged slave's outfit didn't have much in the way of pockets. That was by design, of course, since _actual_ slaves had a tendency towards theft.

Pockets and belt pouches weren't something you ever missed until you didn't have them anymore. And trust.

Something caught Lilith's eye. A huge object barely submerged beneath the river waters. She squinted towards the mysterious object, trying to determine what it was, and slid down the riverbank for a closer look. A massive clam sat submerged beneath the current, nestled amongst many smaller ones. These were fairly common, Lilith knew, producing enormous pearls, used for sculpture more often than jewelery due to their typically being nearly as big as one's head. Not extremely valuable on their own, and she couldn't sculpt, and in any case she was pretty sure sculpture took a lot of time, but this was still way more valuable than anything she'd planned on running into.

"Hey, there, lass, what are you doing on my property?" someone asked from behind her. Lilith spun around. This was the trouble with Ashford Village just past noon. It was so _busy_. You never had time to do anything sneaky. A broad-shouldered peasant man spoke, flanked by a pair of lankier farmhands.

"Sorry, sir," Lilith said, wading towards the bank, "I was just washing the dirt off of myself, I didn't know it was private property."

"Did you think the fence was just there to inconvenience travelers?" the man asked.

"I'm sorry, sir, I wasn't thinking," Lilith said, "I'll leave right now and I won't be back, I promise," she started climbing up the riverbank, thinking to herself how she would be back to violate her promise and get at that pearl. If she could hollow it out it would make a good inkwell for Althea to go with the quill, and her own blood would make for good ink. A "black" pearl was fairly purpley all things told, get some proper parchment to go with it...

"Not so fast, lass," the heavyset farmer grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around. "Do you know what the penalty for trespassing is?"

"Please, sir," Lilith said, wishing that just _once_ someone would give her a break, "forgive a slave's foolishness, I'll be on my way."

"That doesn't answer my question, does it?" the man asked.

"Yeah, answer his question," one of the farmhands said. Just what this bully needed; _lackeys_.

"It's...Ten lashes, for a slave," Lilith said, swallowing, "and possibly removal of a hand if it's suspected something's been stolen. Please, sir, I didn't mean any harm."

"Oh, I'm sure," the man said, "if you're so terribly benign, what don't you prove it? Do me a little favor?"

Oh, great. A peasant who knew how to extort labor from a slave. And she had walked right into it, quite literally by blindly stepping onto his property. "What do you want?" Lilith asked.

"Well, I've got this problem," he took Lilith by the arm and led her towards the mill, his mill, presumably. "I was going to make myself some honey-infused flour, you see, something sweet. But it haven't worked quite right, and now I've got a terrible swarm of bees in my mill."

"So, you want me to...?" Lilith asked. Summon a swarm to kill the bees? Did he know she could do that? That would not be good.

"Well, anytime any of us tries to get close, we end up stung," the farmer (or perhaps more accurately, miller) said.

"Yeah, stung bad," one of the farmhands said, rolling up his sleeve to reveal several large lumps from the bee stings, "these bees are nasty ones, they are."

"You see, my farmhands refuse to go into the mill to get the honeycomb that's attracting the bees, say I'm not paying them enough," the miller said, "and I can't blame them for knowing their worth, so's I looked around to find someone worth a little less." The miller grinned, "and look who I find come walking in to do me a favor."

Lilith glanced at the mill. Even from outside she could faintly hear the buzzing coming from within. There were a _lot_ of bees inside...She suppressed a shudder, both at them and at the renewed squirming from within her as the plague locusts wriggled beneath her skin. Somehow their tiny bug brains knew it was about time to come out. "If I get rid of the bees and the honeycomb, you won't mention this to the Guard?" Lilith asked.

"That's about the size of it, lass, take it across the bridge," he pointed towards a bridge about a hundred feet away that crossed the river, "and I'll keep quiet, though if you drag your feet about it I might report you anyway."

It was all the encouragement Lilith needed. She tugged open the heavy wooden door and the miller and his help backed away as a few bees flew out. They were not an angry swarm, but instead buzzed about Lilith, perhaps out of curiosity. It wasn't until she stepped inside that they started swarming. She winced and stifled a moan of pain as the angry bees stung at her while she was closing the door behind her. Once inside she let out a scream and the plague locusts rushed out from inside her, erupting from her mouth and crawling from every other orifice across her body. Distantly she could hear the miller's booming laugh. Her deathly swarm did bloody battle with the bees through the mill, bees filling the locusts with enough poison to kill them in a heartbeat, and locusts tearing the smaller insects in half with ease.

Lilith grabbed the honeycomb and shoved the door open again, racing across the ground as a small army of bees broke off from the main swarm to chase after her, still large enough to make a fair-sized cloud. The miller and his help ran, and the bees did not pursue. Soon they were watching and jeering again. Lilith's headstart didn't last long; her entire body came alive with pain as the bees caught up and stung. They were desperate, Lilith knew, it was the lifeblood of their nest she had stolen. But she was desperate too, and the stupid bees could make a new nest across the bridge.

The first few stings were only annoying, but soon the embers of pain were fanned into flames of agony; Lilith wondered how much of her blood ran with poison by now. By the time Lilith crossed the bridge, the honeycomb seemed to leap from her hands of its own volition, her body demanding that she get rid of the thing. Then she screamed, a banshee's wail that sent the bees into a mad frenzy. The buzzing in the area grew louder, they crawled across her body, but they had ceased their attack. They crawled inside her now, into her mouth and nostrils and ears and everywhere else they could fit, and when there was no more room the bees calmed, and settled onto the honeycomb and began rebuilding.

Lilith crawled a few feet across the bridge, pulled herself to her feet, and then began walking. The miller and his farmhands still chuckled at her as she made the trip back to them. If the thirty seconds it took to run to the bridge had seemed stretched into minutes by the cloud of angry bees that had followed her, the minutes it took her to walk back, gingerly avoiding stepping in ways that agitated the stings on her feet, seemed like hours. "That's it, then?" Lilith asked, "you won't tell the Guard?"

"Well, let's see, then," the miller said, stepping towards his mill and poking the door open. Lilith remained behind on the road for fear that the miller would accuse her of trespassing _again_. The miller stepped in, every muscle on his body taught and ready to run, looked about, relaxed. After a while he came back to her, and gave her a pat on the back, which of course caused pain to race through her body again as he agitated a dozen stings. The bee's stingers had punched straight through her thin, ragged clothes. "Looks like they're about gone already," the miller said, "I'll keep quiet about it, this time, at least. Come on back if you ever want to do me another favor!" The miller grinned.

Lilith glared back, but said only "yes, sir" on auto-pilot, and began walking away. She didn't think the stings were lethal but she really wasn't sure. The ratio of poison to blood certainly _felt_ like it might kill her, and every second it grew just a little bit worse. She knelt down besides her hiding spot and pulled out the knife, slitting her wrist. She knew from her studies of the dark arts as a noble where to cut to get the most blood out, but she'd die of bloodloss long before she expunged the poison from her system. The important thing was less getting rid of poison, and more making room.

By the time she reached the riverbank, she was too weak and half-paralyzed besides to climb properly, and instead tripped and fell down the bank. The skale snacking on the dead pig hissed and backed away; this wasn't their territory, they had only come here to munch on the pig. Summoning up the last reserves of her strength, Lilith lunged for the throat of the closest one. What she got was its leg, but there were arteries in a leg. Her fangs slid out and she bit down, the other two fleeing as she sucked the blood from the skale, rejuvenating herself. The wound on her wrist sealed over. The swelling on her body went down, soon had almost vanished. Her limbs unlocked themselves. With a satisfied sigh, she pulled away from the drained corpse of the skale.

She waded along the river's edge, beneath the bridge, and cautiously peered up towards the mill. No sign of the miller or his lackeys. Submerging herself, she swam towards the shore, feeling blindly in front of herself until she found the clamshell, and then slid the knife between its lips, ripping it open. She could feel something very round inside, but curiously grainy. Pearls always felt less smooth than they looked. Cutting it free of the clam, she swam back, and did not resurface until she was under the shade of the bridge, gasping for air when she broke the surface. She examined the pearl in her hands. About as big as her closed fist, a beautiful sort-of metallic purple color. "Getting somewhere," she whispered, and climbed back up the bank to hide the pearl and the knife again. They could make her talk like a slave, but they weren't going to make her roll over and die like one.


	5. The Poison Devourer

It was now solidly midafternoon. Lilith had been gone for something like _six hours_. She was going to be beaten every day for a month for this, she thought bitterly, but they were _not_ going to cut her head off. Bruises heal, lashes fade, and someday people would look at the scars on her back and marvel that anyone was stupid enough to bring upon themselves the wrath of Lilith de Magi, the true scion of her most noble and ancient lineage.

Right now, though, she was thanking Thorn for small favors, and cursing every other god for all the disasters large and small they had thrown at her today. Another farmer, Pitney, had told her that he needed a message sent to Duke de Gaban, and invoked Gaban's authority for the task. Since Gaban's authority trumped that of both Lord Osric and Sir Roblis, Lilith had found herself commandeered for the task. She could have mentioned that she was on an errand for the king's own Guard, but then she would have to actually go on that errand and she still had not found a way to deliver the unsealed letter to Warmarshal Saberlin without getting her head cut off. So now she was following the road across the bridge and then north, towards the devourers' nest, where Gaban was running another slave or two through his gauntlet.

The small favor, however, was that Pitney had given her some cloth to bundle up the package he expected to get in return from Gaban. He'd also given her a dire warning about making sure it reached him intact, but that was standard procedure, really. You couldn't expect to get much of anything out of a slave without a threat and a peasant could hardly be expected to know of her noble lineage just by looking. Really, she was starting to get sick of reminding _herself_ that she was a noble.

The important thing was, the cloth could be used to bundle up all the stuff she had been hiding around the Village. She had the pearl, the quill, the message for Saberlin, and the plate she had bought for Sir Roblis. She took a detour (she was already horribly late, another hour wouldn't make a difference) to add her wand to the bundle, and now she almost _wished_ Gaban would send her into the devourers' nest. Used to being well-fed on passing bandits and sacrificed slaves, then they're blindsided by a witch with a powerful desire to take out her frustration on _something._ It'd be kind of funny, really.

She could see Gaban now. There was some slave on the ground in front of him, and he was yelling at him and occasionally delivered a savage blow. Lilith braced herself for similar treatment. She'd been through worse; it wasn't so bad; someday he'd personally apologize for his mistake etc. etc. She bowed her head as she approached, then knelt and touched her head to the ground when she drew near enough to speak, waiting for permission to do so. Officially speaking, she was supposed to do this with _everyone_ she spoke to, but most people were only irritated by the formality. Gaban had a reputation for demanding proper traditional supplication from his slaves, though.

Lilith's head was yanked to the side by her hair and she suppressed a yelp of pain. Gaban examined her brand. It never stopped getting irritating. "What does the _Roblis estate_ want with me, scum?" Gaban asked.

"Your grace, Farmer Pitney sent me, he said the errand was commanded by your authority," Lilith said, grateful that she wasn't actually there for the Roblis estate. Gaban made no effort to hide his enmity for the Adelbern supporters.

"Ah, so Pitney's here for what I've promised him," Gaban said, "you hear that, Hathorn? There's no stalling any longer!"

"Please, your grace," the slave called Hathorn said, "what have I done to displease you? The devourers will...Well, they shall devour me, your grace!"

Gaban planted another savage kick between Hathorn's ribs. "I didn't ask for your opinion," he spat on Hathorn's cowering body, "I'll _never_ need the opinion of the likes of you. You're lower than swine. I'm _insulted_ that you would even dare ask."

Lilith genuinely could not tell if he was truly angry or just terrifying Hathorn for fun, but she knew she wanted to go into that cave. "Please, your grace, you won't require me to go inside with him, will you?" she asked. "Someone will have to deliver a message back to Pitney, right?"

Gaban spat again, Lilith could feel it soaking into her hair. "Want to go in with him, do you?" he asked. So much for reverse psychology. He grabbed her by the hair and forced her to look up at him. Now Lilith was scared; was she going to come all this way to be killed on a whim of the bloodthirsty Duke? She couldn't sneak her way past a steel-plated boot to her skull. The Duke laughed. "Hathorn, have you found a whore to fuck you before you go?" He grinned, "someone with a soft body and softer head who doesn't know there's no room for your...Filthy breeding in that cave? Don't call it devourers' nest for nothing, do they?" Gaban scrutinized Lilith's face, and his expression changed. His grin grew less boisterous, more calculating, less wide, more thin. "Or is it just that you don't have the guts to throw yourself in the river?"

"I..." Lilith started, searching for some explanation that would put her in the damn cave and not out here with a bloodcrazed lunatic who was trained and equipped to slaughter witches by the cartload. "Your grace, if Thorn wants me alive, he'll see me through the nest in one piece, and if he doesn't...If he doesn't, I want it over with, and I'm only sucking up perfectly good food for your horses in the meantime, aren't I? That's what everyone always says."

Gaban grinned wide again. "Well, then, it's a date," he said, and dragged Lilith to her feet, giving her a shove towards the cave, then gave Hathorn another kick. "Not going to let your whore go in all by herself, are you?" Gaban asked, "get going, or my axe will do the devourers' job for 'em."

Hathorn looked to Gaban, then to Lilith walking into the cavern, then to Gaban again, and clambered to his feet, following after her. "We're going to die," Hathorn said, his voice shaking, "we're going to die here, Thorn don't care for any of us, we're the ones Thorn never cared for. We're going to die."

"Maybe he never cared for _you_," Lilith said, and she could feel the swarm stirring in her again. The cave soon vanished off into darkness. Lilith was reasonably certain the devourers didn't navigate by sight, particularly seeing as how they spent so much time underground. "We should move deeper in," she said, heading into the gloom.

"There's no light in there," Hathorn said, "and...The devourers..."

"I'd rather deal with them than the Duke," Lilith said without stopping. Hathorn glanced back at Gaban, who still peered into the darkness, on the off-chance a devourer emerge at the mouth of the cave to devour the slave who'd earned his ill favor. Ducking his head as though to avoid some unseen blow, Hathorn hurried after Lilith.

"Did you really mean what you said to the Duke?" Hathorn asked, "do you really _want_ to-oh!" He stumbled and fell flat on his face. Lilith sighed while a few of the smaller bugs crawled out from beneath her fingertips, humming towards Hathorn. Lilith wasn't certain _how_, but they could navigate in the dark. Once her probing feet touched Hathorn's warm flesh, she reached down and grabbed him by the arm to pull him up. "Thank you," Hathorn said, "how can you see in here?"

"Good night eyes, I guess," Lilith said, bending down to feel at what he'd tripped over. Her locusts were drawn to it. A quick investigation revealed why; ribs. Following the spine up she discovered a human skull, most of a complete skeleton, a few bones cracked. "And no. I lied to the Duke. Honestly, I just want to kill something."

"Do you know how _big_ devourers are?" Hathorn asked.

"Yes," Lilith said, finding some cloth leftover on the corpse and stripping it away, "I saw the one on display in King Adelbern's private collection at Rin. Dead, obviously, but same size. About the length of a cow, but much shorter."

"You were in Rin?" Hathorn said.

"I...I don't want to talk about it," Lilith said, wrapping the cloth around a thighbone. That would burn for a little bit, now if only she could find some way to _light_ the damn thing. Maybe she'd be better off just using her swarm to navigate.

"Alright," Hathorn said. "In any case, I'm glad you came with me, whatever happens."

"Save your thanks," Lilith said, shoving the bone torch in her parcel and pulling the thorny wand from it. She wished this thing would glow the way an elementalist's or mesmer's might, but even if she couldn't see a target at least she could fire at it. She let a few of the larger locusts climb out her throat and following their buzzing down the corridor, tracing her toes slowly across the ground to avoid stumbling over anything. Occasionally her feet stumbled into a rock or more bones and she winced, but kept moving. What she wouldn't give for more light. "You probably deserve this anyway."

"What?" Hathorn said, taken aback, "what do you mean?"

"Gaban's a Lunatic noble, you're a slave," Lilith said, "and really, getting back to first principles, you wouldn't _be_ a slave if you didn't deserve this sort of thing. You're the chafe of society."

Hathorn did not respond for a while. "Do you really believe that?" he said, "what does that make you then? Is this some kind of prank?" Lilith opened her mouth and shut it again. "I should've known you were crazy when you thought you could kill a nest of devourers," Hathorn said.

"No, no, listen," Lilith said, while one of her larger locusts buzzed insistently at her from further in the cave. Lilith hesitated. "You're right," she said finally, "legal status doesn't mean anything in this kingdom anymore, and...Obviously I should know that." She sighed. "I'm sorry."

Hathorn didn't respond while Lilith fumbled her way towards the needy locust, which was now buzzing in short bursts to reinforce that it wasn't flapping its wings for its health. Her hands groped in the dark through more bones, into a pack ripped open and mostly emptied, but hidden within was a flint. Lilith smiled. There was some luck at least, now if she could just remember how these things work. "It's alright," Hathorn said finally, "it's not like I'm not used to being insulted by now."

"Were you born into this?" Lilith asked, striking the flint against the torch and hoping the cloth was dry enough to catch. If he was from a slave family, he would've been a slave under the reign of the queen, she realized, and then her apology wouldn't have been worth much.

"No," Hathorn said, "I...My niece was ill, and starving. And the local noble was holding a feast, and I snuck in as one of the servants attending the feast to steal some food for her. I was caught, and they sold me. That was just a few months ago."

"If Adelbern were a competent ruler, he'd keep the peasants fed and happy," Lilith said, still trying to light the torch, "the common people are the foundation of the kingdom. An unruly population is like building a fortress on sand. No bread, no circuses," the torch lit, and illuminated Lilith's smile in its flickering luminescence, "no kingdom." Lilith thrust the torch in front of her, and Hathorn grabbed her hand and yanked it back. "What're you-" Lilith began.

"It's not a lantern," Hathorn said, "stick it out front and you'll blind yourself. Just let your eyes adjust."

Lilith squinted in the dark. The light provided by the torch _was_ pretty pathetic, barely even illuminating Hathorn's face three feet next to her. She couldn't rely on the torchlight alone to navigate, but she worried she didn't have the time to let her eyes adjust. "Thanks," Lilith said. As her eyes adjusted, the darkness slowly receded, revealing three devourers standing about ten feet out, their beady eyes staring motionlessly at them. One of them clicked a pincer together.

Lilith raised a wand in a panic and fired at the devourers, opening her mouth to release the full swarm again. Hathorn panicked and backed away as the locusts raced out to attack the devourers, and the devourers raced out to attack the two of them. They staggered and came to a halt as the plague locusts, now joined by their new bee allies, rushed out and slipped between the chinks in the massive carapace of the devourers, eating them from within. The massive bugs writhed with pain as they died. "Hathorn, come to me," Lilith said, "follow my voice! We need to stick together!"

"Right, coming, where are you?" Hathorn said.

"Still he-" Lilith got out before Hathorn collided with her, sending them both to the ground. Lilith pulled him up with her, hanging on tight to his hand. "Don't let go, and if you _do_, just hit the dirt and stay there until I give the all clear. If a devourer comes for you...Well, hit it hard and good luck."

"Right," Hathorn said, "you...You're a witch."

"Yeah," Lilith said, but her further explanation was interrupted by a stinger burying itself in her shoulder. She winced with pain and fired her wand blindly in the direction of the attacker, a whiptail devourer that could fling its stingers great distances, and a pained chittering told her that at least one of the blasts had hit. Though the wand's tip did not glow, its volleys did, and from them Lilith could find a target, and she sent her swarm out to devour the enemy again. While the bugs worked, she crouched down, evading another stinger that thudded into the wall behind her.

"Alright, where are you?" Lilith asked, and she and Hathorn played a few more rounds of Marco Polo to find one another.

"Where are the eggs?" Hathorn asked.

"Eggs?" Lilith responded.

"Yes, that's what we're here for. I guess it was before you got here, but Gaban wants the eggs," Hathorn said.

"Right." Lilith closed her eyes. Her swarm wasn't warning her about the devourers the way they had found her the flint, but maybe if she directed them..._Find me their eggs_ Lilith thought, _the eggs of the giant bugs_. A moment later, the locusts began buzzing on and off again, like if crickets' chirping were menacing instead of cheerfully irritating. Lilith and Hathorn followed it to an actual nest of the nest. "How many does he need?" Lilith asked.

"As many as we can carry," Hathorn said, "he'll want at least two or three."

"Hide one of them," Lilith said, "a devourer's egg might come in handy if a noble wants them so badly. There should be plenty here."

"Oh, yes, plenty," Hathorn said, and Lilith's bugs were buzzing at her again. Hathorn fumbled about, "I've found at least five already, it's amaz-aiee!" he yelped and jumped away as his hand stumbled across a couple of locusts, which nibbled a bit at his skin and then took off. Hathorn cleared his throat and said "yes, as I was saying, quite a few. I guess we stumbled fairly deep into their nest."

"Yeah," Lilith said, kneeling down where her bugs had led her. Her hands graced bone, but it was longer and thinner than any human bone...Crafted, she realized. A staff. Well, except for the phalanges still gripping it, those were natural, but she pried them off and hefted up her prize. "I think my locusts and the devourers think they're both from the same nest for some reason," she said, "the devourers seemed pretty calm that we were just walking around in their nest, and my locusts didn't warn me they were right in front of us." The staff came to life in her hands, a heatless green fire within the eye sockets of the many small skulls adorning its tip. Such small skulls, were they children? Lilith smiled. It would have to be a powerful black magic if it was. "And the locusts have been pretty good at being my eyes in this place so far."

"I think we have what we need," Hathorn said, "but I'm not sure if the Duke will be happy or angry that we've come back with it. He _does_ enjoy his omelets..."

Lilith ignored him and focused on her swarm again. _Find me the poison one,_ she said, _find the poison devourer so I can take its stinger to Mhenlo. _The locusts dispersed themselves through the cavern, searching for the devourer. Suddenly it occurred to Lilith that if she were to be attacked right now, she'd have to rely on her staff and her fangs alone. And that was when the ground began churning beneath her.

Lilith stepped back in alarm as the massive devourer emerged beneath her, its twin tails flailing towards her. She ducked under them, sent out a jolt from her staff, and the creature hissed in pain, stepping to the side on its chitinous legs and taking another swing at her. Lilith leapt backwards and landed on her back, and the creature raced towards her. She shot it again with her staff, checking its advance, and got to her feet, but another lash from the massive beast and her staff was sent flying from her hands. Her wand she had left on the ground, and she would make little use of her fangs without getting in range of its powerful pincers, pincers that could snap her neck in half in a heartbeat.

She backed away, hoping she could stay away from the thing long enough for her swarm to return to her. It lashed out at her legs, and she was too slow to evade them. The stinger did not puncture her skin, but she was swept off her feet, slamming hard into the ground. The creature advanced on her again, until a rock struck it in the eye and it reared back, chittering with rage. "Come on, over here you big, stupid bug!" Hathorn shouted, tossing another rock, which bounced uselessly off of the thing's carapace. The devourer smacked Lilith across the face with one of its pincers almost as an afterthought, opening up her split lip and sending blood streaming from her nose, but then made for Hathorn, veritably flying across the ground towards him. By the rapidly dimming light of her new staff, Lilith could see Hathorn panic and flee into the dark, and then heard him yelp in pain and terror as he slammed headlong into a wall.

Lilith dove for one of the twin tails of the beast, grabbing onto it and peeling the chitin back to expose the flesh beneath. Blood seeped out of the wound, and she bit in hungrily, holding tight to the one tail, her feet struggling to keep her balance as the powerful limb pulled her across the ground, while the other flailed about wildly. The free tail stung into her shoulder, and Lilith could feel fire racing through her veins. It would seem she had discovered the poison devourer, then.

The locusts arrived and began to devour the devourer, and Lilith backed away, gasping. She knew how to handle poison by now, and fumbled around for her parcel and the knife inside it. A few of her locusts led her to it, and she opened herself up, but this poison was far more fast acting than that of the bees. She ripped her wrist open and blood poured freely, then, holding the knife in her other hand, ripped open the other as well. She only hoped the poison was leaving her system fast enough as she staggered back to the dying devourer and latched onto it again, drinking more from its body...But the carcass had been ripped open and there was little left inside the pool of blood that sat in its insect body.

"Where are you?" Hathorn shouted, "where...Dammit, I don't even know your name!"

"I'm here," Lilith managed, and Hathorn came to her and knelt beside her; she had collapsed onto the ground.

"Are you alright?" Hathorn said.

"Need blood," Lilith said, "poison's gone...Blood's gone too."

"Here," Hathorn said, offering his wrist, "gods know I can lose plenty and be fine in a week."

Lilith bit into his wrist and drank from him. Her eyes widened. _Human_ blood was far better tasting than that of the unclean skale and devourers. She moaned with satisfaction as the blood raced into her. It was better than anything she had ever tasted before. So _this_ is why necromancer nobles kept blood dolls around. She wondered if slaves tasted worse than commoners like Hathorn. She wondered if nobles would taste _even better_.

Reluctantly, Lilith pulled herself away from Hathorn's wrist, and her locusts led her back to her stuff. It came to life again. "We should get going, before more come," Lilith said, ripping off the stinger on the devourer.

"Right," Hathorn said, grinning, "I can't believe I made it. I never thought I would. Everyone knows this is how Gaban kills his slaves. Hey," he turned towards her, "I know I don't have much to offer, but if there's ever anything you need, well...I owe you my life."

"You saved me from the poison devourer," Lilith said, putting her parcel back together and wrapping it up in the cloth while carefully instructing her locusts to please keep her informed if something was going to try and eat her in the meantime.

"You didn't have to come in here at all," Hathorn said.

"Well," Lilith said, and suddenly a thought occurred to her. "There's something you could do for me, actually." She started ripping the cloth in half. "I'm supposed to deliver a package, but I have way too much to do as it is. I'm already extremely late and I'm sure there'll be Hell to pay when I get back to the estate. You might save me a few lashes if you can deliver something for me. It needs to be today, before sundown. Preferably immediately."

"I can find the time," Hathorn said, "Gaban's cruel, but he's also careless."

"Right," Lilith said, wrapping the two pieces of cloth into two separate parcels, one for herself, and one for Hathorn. There wasn't enough room for her wand in hers anymore, but she preferred the staff anyway. She'd just slip in and retrieve it after Gaban left. And if Hathorn really did owe Lilith his life...She offered him the smaller parcel. "I need you to get this to warmarshal Armin Saberlin," she said.


	6. Nobody

As it happens, what Pitney needed from Duke Gaban was a devourer's egg. The reason he needed it was for more bug problems, though, as she drew near to the fields where the bugs dwelt, they apparently did not count as the same kind of bugs as the ones that were crawling inside her. They writhed with fury when they sensed a rival hive burrowing under the ground a few hundred yards hence.

Pitney had taken the egg and asked if Gaban had given her any trouble, to which Lilith responded that he had forced her to retrieve the egg herself. Pitney apologized to her. Actually apologized. "Sorry about that, missy," he'd said in a warm and gruff voice, "if it weren't you it'd be some other unfortunate slave." And perhaps one who deserved it, she thought, but caught herself before wandering into thinking that _all_ the other slaves deserved it. She didn't want to stumble into insulting a perfectly respectable peasant like Hathorn again. And then she was thinking about Hathorn again. She didn't _know_ that Saberlin would hurt him. He was busy, and maybe he just couldn't be bothered to kill slaves over potentially dire news. He was just a _slave_, after all, how much harm could he do? And in any case, Hathorn had said himself that he owed Lilith his life. _Plus_ even with everyone in their proper station he was a peasant and she was a noble and dying for her was his _job_. To say nothing of the fact that it was really that new Ashford Guard captain's fault for breaking the seal on the letter in the first place (what was her name, anyway?).

More importantly it was in the past, and Pitney was in the present, and was actually _giving her money_. "Here's for your trouble," he said, "if the Guard asks, it's a token for your master for occupying his property's time. Between you and me, I won't tell anyone if you spend some for yourself," and he winked.

"M-May I go, sir?" Lilith had asked, momentarily stunned at being paid to do something. Did peasants just _do_ this, offer money to slaves for errands they were legally required to perform anyway? Weren't Adelbern's taxes keeping them at the brink of starvation? Well, she supposed not _all_ of them would be, but what were the odds she'd run into two in one day? Ten gold, Lilith counted. Nothing to sneeze at.

"Gonna count it right in front of me?" Pitney asked with a grin.

"Oh, sorry, sir, I didn't mean to be rude," Lilith said, "I just...Well, I didn't expect this kind of generosity."

Pitney chuckled. "Aye, I suppose doing things for free is sort of the point of slavery, innit? Wasn't raised to be in anyone's debt, though, even if they weren't in any position to collect. You done me a favor, I done one for you. Fair's fair." There was so much wrong with that but Lilith didn't want to make him angry and anyways peasants could hardly be expected to know better. "You can go if you like, I've got work to do now," Pitney said, "unless you can find some way to convince that new captain Devona to do her damn job and protect my fields."

So _that_ was her name. "What do you mean?" Lilith asked.

"Fields are full of worms. Giant ones. It's what the egg is for, bait to lure out the queen. I can hack up the little ones on my own, but the queen, she's a nasty piece of work. Gotta try, though. So long as those worms are chewing up my fields, I won't have near enough to feed my family through winter come harvest time."

"Meet me in the fields in an hour" Lilith said, "I can help."

And that's how she ended up walking towards a field full of worms to kill them all. She had used the hourlong detour to pick up her staff from the cave, relocating it and the egg to another, more convenient hiding spot inside a rather spacious hollow in a tree, and planted her wand in a different hiding spot in what had been a rabbit's burrow before she yanked the rabbit out and snapped its neck, just in case the first was discovered. She hadn't actually put the staff _in_ the tree yet, of course, as she'd need it for the worm killing.

Sneaking to the fields with the staff proved difficult, however, because the nearby hills were absolutely swarming with bandits. Some rookie elementalist, hardly good for more than getting campfires going, had tried to ambush her and take the staff, and now she was covered in burns only partially healed when she had latched onto the short man's neck and sucked the life out of him. She still had a cuts healing from her fight with the skale in the morning, plus the punctures in her shoulder, and several of the bee stings hadn't healed entirely, and there was her split lip, her bloodied nose, and then the hole punched into her shoulder and back by the devourers, all only _mostly_ healed by her blood-drinking frenzy. She was pretty sure she had traded out every drop of blood in her body for someone or something else's, and worried briefly if that meant she was no longer a noble, but then the locusts crawling through her veins began acting up and she realized she was at the field. There was Pitney with the egg.

"I hope you're good at keeping secrets," Lilith said as she approached, deciding not to even _try_ to hide the staff from him. Surely he wouldn't report her when she came to help him. "I think it goes without saying that _this,_" she shook the staff, "is something I would appreciate the de Roblis estate not hearing about."

Pitney raised an eyebrow. "Where's a slave get a trinket like that?" he asked.

"Among the dead in the devourers' cave. And fortunately I know how to use it. I was a noble before I was sold." It suddenly hit her just how much of a risk she was taking, and her bravado shrank backwards. "I...Really, please don't tell anyone," she said, "I hardly know any witchcraft but they might kill me for using any at all. I wasn't even a slave when I learned it." That last part wasn't entirely true, but the last thing she wanted was to end up with her head chopped off _anyway_ after all the effort she'd put into keeping it today. A week she'd been a witch, and only today was she threatened with execution no less than three times.

"I was always told witches ain't good folk," Pitney said.

"If you really think just knowing a few black arts is so bad, I've got a year's worth of whip marks to show I've paid for it," Lilith said, "I'm here to help, and no one ever told me necromancy was wrong. Unpleasant, sure, but not _immoral_."

Pitney sighed. "World's complicated, and you're young. Certainly I wouldn't want you to lose your pretty head over it."

"Thank you," Lilith said, "give me the egg?"

Pitney handed her the egg, and the buzzing inside of her grew to a fever pitch as she stepped into the center of the field and dropped it there. The other worms ignored her; they just burrowed out from the ground, devoured a few stalks of wheat, and then returned beneath the earth, paying no heed to her even when she was scarcely five feet away. One of them fought a losing battle with a savage wolf on the outskirts of the fields. But once the egg was planted, it didn't take long for a half-dozen of them to surface, fighting over it. One of them was larger than the others, bit off the head of one, bit through the middle of the other with a crunch until it collapsed, and the rest retreated. The queen grasped the egg in its jaws and swallowed it whole. Lilith hoped Pitney wasn't planning on making an omelet from that.

Lilith's swarm flew from her again and...That was the end of it. Moments later the locusts were picking the meat off the inside of its carapace. "That was it?" Lilith said, as Pitney stepped closer to examine the queen's corpse, "that was the big finish? I was kind of expecting more of a fight."

"You and me both," Pitney said, "maybe I should've just killed the pest myself."

"Well, either way," Lilith said and shrugged. She raised a hand to block out the sun and tried to judge the time from its position. She had several hours left before sunset. She was not looking forward to her return to the Roblis Estate, but she was starting to run out of time. If she stayed out past sunset, she'd be declared a runaway and declared kill-on-sight, and plenty of young knights appreciated the target practice. She was lucky to have been picked up by the guards before knights errant on the occasions when she actually _had_ tried to run away.

"Not so fast," Pitney said as Lilith began walking away, "I told you, fair's fair, and you came all this way and killed the thing, didn't you?"

"How much money do you have to spare?" Lilith asked.

"Enough to settle a debt," Pitney said, opening up his coin pouch.

"Actually," Lilith glanced towards the bandit camp she could just barely make out in the hills. "Do you think you could do me a favor in return?"

"Depends on the favor. What do you need?" Pitney asked.

"Well, you know those bandits in the hills?" Lilith asked.

"Course I do," Pitney said, "they only rob me every week like they're the tax man." _And yet you still have gold to give out to passing slaves. Are you rich or just crazy?_ Lilith wondered.

"I need a gift worthy of a noble lady," Lilith said, "a duchess, actually. I think their camp might have something."

"Why would you need something like that?" Pitney asked, "a _duchess_?"

"I think it's one of those tasks assigned a slave just so you can punish them for their inevitable failure," Lilith said with a sigh, "but I'm not giving up yet."

"Well I can't hardly storm a bandit camp for you," Pitney said, "there's a difference between taking a risk and a suicide mission, and attacking that camp is the latter. Takes more than a few hungry bugs to scare them off, and the Guard won't deal with _them_, either. Says they don't have the men, sent 'em all north of the Wall."

"Yeah, I don't need them dead, just distracted," Lilith said, "I can look for something valuable, snag it from their camp, and no harm done to anyone who doesn't deserve it, right?"

"Hrmmmm," Pitney pondered for a moment. Lilith could feel precious minutes slipping away. She hoped whatever distraction he was thinking up wouldn't take a whole lot of time. Then Pitney smiled. "I'll drive the wolves to them," he said, "scare 'em right into the camp with some fire. The bandits will turn out on one side to beat them off, then you can slip in the other and nick something."

"Sounds good," Lilith said with a smile, and thanked Thorn for delivering the craziest peasant in the kingdom to her. Risking his life on a distraction for a slave just because she'd done him a favor he was legally owed? The best kind of crazy she'd met all day. When she was back where she belonged, this peasant was getting himself a sack of platinum.

The shadows were beginning to grow, making it easier for Lilith to sneak towards the bandit's camp. There she waited until she heard the howling and snarling of wolves, and the sounds of battle. Darting towards the camp, she found her way blocked by a torch-wielding sentry. Swearing, she raised the staff to blast at him. He weakened just long enough for Lilith to tackle him headlong to the ground and bury her fangs in his neck. She didn't bother sucking him dry; the wolves wouldn't fight long, she suspected, so once he went into shock she rose to her feet and shoved the bottom of her staff through his eye socket. _One less bandit in Ascalon, at least._

She was in the outskirts of the camp, and it was mercifully deserted. Frantically she searched for something that might be valuable; the sounds of battle were only fifty feet away. Several of the bandits stood on alert in the heart of the camp even closer. She slipped into a tent. A chest lay in one corner, but of course it was locked. A quick glance around revealed no key. She had no time for this! She put her fist through the soft wood of the chest, wincing with pain as it shattered and sliced up her hand. "What was that?" she could hear a voice saying, and she grabbed the contents of the chest, some pendant, and slipped out of the tent, running to hide behind a nearby bush. One of the bandits cautiously approached the tent, pulled back the flap, poked around inside. Lilith held her breath as he emerged again, his eyes scanning the nearby area.

But then he left. "Whatever it was, it ran off," he said. Had he not noticed the broken chest? It was rather dark...Or maybe it was just that there was something else in the chest, and the bandit pocketed it for himself rather than sound the alarm. Either way, Lilith started breathing again and found the sentry. She still needed parchment for this gift, and his skin would do.

Pulling the corpse down from the hills was terrifying for about the first five minutes, but the discipline of the bandit watch left a lot to be desired. They just seemed to sort of mull about in the general area of the camp and call for backup whenever they saw something they couldn't handle, and most of them didn't even make themselves very hard to spot. It was probably a bad thing that they had gotten so bold only a mile from Ashford, and not much further than that from Ascalon City.

Pitney was fine. He seemed thrilled, really. "Saw one of them get their throat ripped right out!" he said, "serves the thieving bastards right. What's that one for?"

"Gonna make him into parchment for the duchess," Lilith said while using her knife to rip away the corpse's clothes, "you should keep the skinned body. Make a scarecrow out of him, leave him somewhere in the hills, far away from your property. Bandits won't know who did it, but they'll know _someone_ has it in for them."

"I just might," Pitney said with a grin.

It took the better part of an hour to flay the skin off, and a visit to Ashford Village, where she had to offer a merchant five gold, about two and a half times the standard market price if she remembered correctly, for him to break out an identification kit and give her a few pieces of it so that she could examine the pendant she'd stolen. Slaves could not typically identify the magical properties of an object, but Lilith had made more use of her noble upbringing in the past nine hours than she had in the past year combined. As it happened, the amulet was cursed. Once worn it could not be removed, and it caused a sensation as though a dull bit were drilled into the wearer's chest where the amulet lay. Lilith decided against trying it on. Finally, she filled the pearl inkwell with her own blood (if it could even be called her own anymore, but plenty of nobles were necromancers who fed on slaves regularly, so clearly you couldn't actually lose your noble blood by drinking too many commoners).

Lilith held onto a dream. Dreams occupied that hazy point between fantasy and destiny. It wasn't really very _likely_. It wasn't an inevitability quietly marching towards reality. But it _could_ happen. And the dream that Lilith held onto was that Osric would ask how a slave might find such a wonderful gift, and she would explain she was in truth a noble, and he would use his considerable power to have her restored to her proper place that instant and _dare_ the Roblis' or the other Magi's to do something about it.

But she knew he'd probably just take it and tell her to get lost.

"Lord Osric," she said, having found him in Ashford Village.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"I have a gift for-" she nearly said Duchess Althea, then remembered she wasn't actually supposed to have heard that part of the conversation, "for a noble lady. You ordered me to find one this morning."

"And what have you got?" Osric asked.

"A golden feather quill fresh from the moa, an inkpot made from a hollowed out black pearl, parchment made from the skin of a bandit, and a cursed pendant," Lilith said, offering her parcel.

Osric took it and examined the contents. "Where does a slave get all of these pretty trinkets?" he asked.

"The quill was found outside a pen, the pearl found in a clam by the river, the pendant was taken from the bandit camp while they were distracted by some battle, and the bandit's skin was taken from the aftermath," Lilith said, "I promise you everything was legal, m'lord."

"Well then, let us see if the prince is impressed with what you've gotten for his fiancee!" Osric said, and gestured for Lilith to follow. Lilith sucked in a breath and trailed afterwards. This was _not_ how she had hoped to meet Rurik. Why didn't Osric just take his prize and let her go? This did not bode well.

Shadows were growing long when they Osric pulled Rurik from the stands of Althea's theater. She was not actually performing tonight, but Rurik frequented her plays anyway. She put them on in the classical style of King Thorn, with a heavy emphasis on deviancy, humor, and the triumph of the royal family over their opponents. In recent times it was popular to use the charr as the antagonists, but Althea preferred to set her plays in the Holy Wars of years past, when Ascalon, Orr, and Kryta fought with one another in the wake of the overthrow of Kryta's Thorn-blooded monarchy by the White Mantle movement. It was something of a risque statement, but being a duchess, Althea could get away with it.

Rurik adored them, of course, which made Lilith all the more nervous about having her work presented during a performance. Being worth the Prince's time was hard enough when she wasn't competing with anything in particular. Lilith fell to her knees when he approached, hardly breathing. "So," Rurik said, to Osric, "certainly she's done better than all the rest."

"That she has," Osric said, "it's quite creative actually."

"What does this do?" Rurik asked, holding the pendant.

"Once worn it is unremovable without magical assistance and causes a constant grinding pain but causes no injury, Your Majesty," Lilith said.

"How lucky that you were able to identify it as such," Osric said, "and know exactly which laws to avoid breaking. And noble sensibilities. I do suspect you've received some sort of assistance. Has some daft noble shared their education with you?"

"I...I was a noble, m'lord," Lilith said, "I was Lilith de Magi, and was sold for flaunting my support of His Majesty the Prince."

"Interesting," Rurik said. He stopped and considered a moment. He knelt down beside her, brushed a few strands away, and examined the Roblis arms branded behind her ear. After a long silence, he said "get up and follow me."

Lilith rose and followed and wondered: Was this it? They were headed back towards the theater now. Was Rurik _really_ going to help her? It was surely too much to ask that he re-enoble her. If the Prince had that kind of influence to spend on someone for fetching a nice birthday present, surely he'd be using it. But he could simply _buy_ her, couldn't he? Maybe he would. She would still _legally_ be a slave, but she would instead be a knight for the Prince. Could she be so lucky?

The Prince led her backstage. The curtain had been dropped and the drama went on in the thin slice of stage between it and the end of the stage, while here, various stagehands prepared for the finale. A number of slaves stood locked into various cages and torture devices, and a fear began gnawing at Lilith. Althea herself was waiting next to a simple X-shaped rig, meant to bind a kneeling slave's wrists above their head.

"Duchess Althea," Rurik said, slowly and with a flourish of his hand, "tomorrow is your birthday, but in my impatience I shall shower all of my gifts upon you tonight. You've received twelve already, and here is the last. She comes with a stationary kit and a cursed pendant, which is irremovable and causes a grinding pain in the wearer."

"I think I want the trinkets _and_ the slave," Althea said with a smile, "fancy that."

"Ah, but wait a moment, m'lady," Rurik said, "this one has a story to tell. Go on, tell her who you are."

Althea looked expectantly to Lilith. "I'm...Well, I _was_ Lilith de Magi," Lilith said, "I supported His Majesty the Prince over his father. Quite openly, towards the end. And my family sold me, your grace, and I swear by Thorn I am telling the truth and that my only crime was my support of His Majesty. Please, believe me."

"Hmmm," Althea said, twirling towards Rurik to lean against his side. "This _is_ a tasty one," she said with a grin, "I want you to do it."

"Well, alright," Rurik said, giving Althea a warm smile before giving her a brief kiss, "but only because it's for your birthday. I'm not a stagehand, you know."

"Do what?" Lilith asked, and Rurik snapped his fingers and a stagehand ran towards him and offered him a small bag of tools. Rurik forced her to her knees in front of the x-shaped rig. "Your Majesty, please," Lilith said, "I was born a noble. I'm not like _them_!"

Rurik retrieved a hammer and a four-inch nail from the bag, placing it above her palm. The stagehand began to shove a gag into Lilith's mouth, but Althea waved her hand. "Let this one scream," she said, "I think they're about wrapped up out there."

Scream she did as the nail pierced the flesh of her palm. She could feel the bones snapping inside her as Rurik pounded the nail through her. "I'm not _chafe_," Lilith said, gasping for breath, "I'm a leader of the common folk. I'm educated."

Rurik placed the second nail above her wrist. "You are chafe," he said, and she screamed again as he pounded the nail into her. "Your parents support a cowardly merchant-king of barely noble birth, who repeals our ancient traditions to make money."

"But not me," Lilith said in a whisper so breathless it was barely audible, and then screamed again as Rurik hammered the nail all the way in. Lilith clutched at her arm with her free hand.

Rurik peeled her free hand back and placed it against the opposite beam of the rig. "You still don't understand?" Rurik said. "Half my blood comes from the line of Thorn, but the other half? Just the Baron of Drascir with delusions of grandeur. And my mother's mother was not of Thorn either. The blood has grown so terribly thin. And clearly I'm not the only one." Lilith shrieked again, tugged at the nails that now pinned both her arms to the rig, and a renewed agony flowed through her limbs. "There is some blood of Thorn in me. But the blood of so many noble families has clearly been diluted to worthlessness. My father's. Your parents'. And, thus, yours."

"Your highness, please," Lilith sobbed, "I would have followed you into Hell."

"The de Magi line clearly died some time ago," Rurik said, "you might have appropriated the name, but it's obvious you were born de Nemo." He tossed the cursed pendant onto Lilith's chest, and it latched onto her collar bone. She gasped with pain as it began churning through her flesh, a pain that would _never_ go away. "You are the scion of nobody, belong nowhere, and are worth nothing." He and Althea exchanged some sweet words, but Lilith could not hear them through the pain. She was dimly aware of the curtain rising and the play going on around her. Night fell, the stage brightly illuminated by lanterns, and she heard the audience cheering while her ears throbbed.

Through the whole performance, Lilith cried.


	7. The Monk's Mission

It was the pain in her chest that woke her up. The grinding at the center of her collarbone, the drill bit that dug in endlessly. Every few seconds she heard the faintest of snapping noises, and could not quite tell if it was real or imagined, but the pain spiked every time. She was exhausted. She had barely slept and wanted to go back to sleep. For a few moments, she tried to, but between the stone floor she was sprawled upon and the constant pain in her chest, it was impossible. She soon gave up, cracked open an eye, and tried to find out where she was.

For that matter, _why_ she was at all. Not in the existential sense of what her purpose in life was, a thought she was steadfastly avoiding, but in the sense of why was she still alive? Last she remembered they had hammered nails through her wrists. There were _arteries_ in there. Opening up holes in your wrists was rather the most straightforward way of exsanguinating oneself. She clutched her wrists, but there were only scars left. A hasty healing job, but still, someone had healed her.

Now she was on the floor of a tiny stone room, with a small bed in one corner and a chest at its foot. In the corner was a chamber pot, and in the opposite corner a small bowl of fresh water. Other than that, there was nothing. It looked like a cell, but that it seemed reasonably clean and the door did not look especially sturdy made Lilith suspect that it was a monk's cell rather than a dungeon. The one who'd healed her?

Lilith wasn't sure what to do next. How long had she been asleep? Was she exempt from the penalties for "running away" since she'd been used in the duchess' performance? That would surely be too much to ask. Should she return to the Roblis Estate, or wait where she'd been left? Would she be punished if she left or punished if she stayed? Or _both_?

She crawled towards the water basin and looked at herself in the reflection. Her nose was bent, her split lip had not completely healed and likely wouldn't for at least a few days, and her necromantic scars from her life as a noble hardly stood out from the mess that had been made of her face. The constant grimace wasn't helping her appearance any. She grabbed the pendant stuck to her collarbone and gave it an experimental tug, but that only made the pain worse. Wincing, she released the intricately-detailed golden pendant, and then stared at its reflection for a time, mesmerized by how, out of the corner of her eye, the runes seemed to be moving, and yet when she looked at them directly they were still.

The door flung open, and Lilith gasped and pulled her knees to her chest. A man in the white robes of a working monk stood in the doorway, sword and shield across his back. "You're awake," the monk said, "good."

"H-how long have I been asleep?" Lilith asked.

"The better part of the morning. Probably twelve hours," the monk said. It felt like half that to Lilith. "You're welcome," the monk said.

"Oh, thank you, sir," Lilith said, bowing her head to the floor.

"Get up," the monk said, "I didn't pull you off that crucifex for nothing."

Lilith caught herself before pointing out that technically it wasn't a crucifex because those were taller, and instead rose to her feet with nothing but a "yes, sir."

"Word has gotten around the village about a cunning little slave," the monk said, "Dabbled in the dark arts. Quite the problem solver. A noble by birth."

Lilith swallowed. "I'm just a slave now, sir."

"You don't act like one," the monk said.

"I apologize, sir," Lilith said.

"Don't," the monk said, "I need a noble."

Lilith choked up, and forced herself not to cry on autopilot. "I'm not a noble," she said, "I'll never be a noble again. It just took a year for my sense to catch up with my status." A bitter smile tugged at her lips. "You should've come by yesterday. I'm sure I would've said any number of stupid and embarrassing things about my bloodline."

"So you aren't the girl who assembled a gift fit for a duchess from thin air, skinned a bandit alive and left him as a warning to the others, and commanded the devourers in the nest to leave you unharmed?" The monk asked.

"I...Well, it didn't happen exactly like that," Lilith said.

"Leave," the monk said, stepping aside, "I've heard enough."

It took only a few paces to reach the door to the tiny cell, but she stopped before leaving. "I'm sorry I couldn't be what you wanted me to be, sir," she said, "I just got lucky." The monk gave her a rough shove out the door and closed it behind her.

It was close to noon when she exited the abbey. She wondered briefly if she'd be killed when she reached the Roblis estate, and then wondered if she even cared if she was. What did she have to live for? What was she ever going to have but the cruelty of her betters, the haunting memory of the time, every day more distant, when she was one of them, and the constant agony burrowing into her chest every second of every day?

It was at the gates to Ascalon City that she saw it. The heads of the executed were often posted at the battlements atop them, and there, alongside the rapists and murderers, was the head of Fadden Hathorn. Lilith collapsed. Eyes shut, she sobbed at the side of the road while the foot traffic in and out of the city continued beside her. She wanted to suck in a deep breath and keep moving. She wanted to find some reason why she could deal with this, why it was for the best that things had turned out this way, but there was nothing. "I'm sorry," she sobbed out finally, "it should've been me."

"Are you alright?" a young girl's voice asked. Lilith looked over her shoulder. Gwen had found her. "Did something go wrong?"

"Gwen," Lilith said, her voice flat, "it's you."

"Is this something about..." Gwen leaned in and whispered "you know."

"Gwen, I lied to you," Lilith said, "I'm sorry. I know a few witch tricks, but...I'm just a slave." Lilith got to her feet, looked to Gwen, who said nothing, just stared back at her, mouth open, stunned and then angry. "And I think maybe I should be," Lilith said, and joined the traffic headed into the city, eager to be away before Gwen could find the words to respond.

Coherent thought had ceased some time ago. Lilith had gone from bracing for the impact of the whip, to hoping she would make it 'till it was over, to wondering if they planned on whipping her 'till she died, to not caring if they did so long as it would stop, and finally hung limply from her wrists, bound to the post in the dirt field behind the manor, gasping and stirring only slightly with each time the lash bit into her back again. She was supposed to be counting the blows aloud, but had given up at around sixty. She could feel blood dribbling down her legs, but she was oddly detached from it all. Dimly, she realized that it had stopped. People were talking. She couldn't make out the words.

She could still feel, albeit barely. The constant pain drilling into her chest was barely noticeable compared to the raging fire of agony across her back. She was nearly certain she had no skin left on her back. As bits and pieces of her conscious mind trickled back to her, she wondered about the possibility of infection. Slowly the world started coming back into focus. Paulus the Monk was here, or was she hallucinating now? Was she _dead_?

Paulus spoke to Gartis, the taskmaster of the Roblis estate. Gartis yelled back, but Paulus did not seem concerned. Lilith dropped her head and stared at the dirt; the effort of turning to look had briefly exhausted her. The leathers wrapped around her wrists dug into her skin, and she struggled to her feet to relieve the pain. She pushed herself up with first one leg, sending herself to the side, tried to plant the other, and failed, collapsing to hang from her binds again. She thought she could feel blood trickling down her forearm.

The other slaves had been gathered to witness her punishment, as was standard. Some looked on horrorstruk, fearful that with Sir Roblis in such a foul mood and Gartis' bloodlust whetted, they would be next. Others scowled. Toby, the boy she'd yelled at for touching her the first day she'd come to the Roblis Estate, was smiling. He had mocked her after her indignant attitude got her beaten the first time, and mocked her at every beating since.

She dropped her head again, sucked in a deep breath, and managed to stagger to her feet. The harsh binds dug into her wrists still, she could see that a small trickle of blood was indeed climbing down her arm, but with her weight on her feet where it belonged the pain in her arms relented. The fire on her back raged on undaunted. Her legs shook under her weight and she turned to look at Paulus and Gartis again, only now Gartis was gone. Paulus looked in her direction. He seemed bored. Was he waiting for something? "W-what," Lilith managed, but couldn't find the rest of the sentence.

Gartis returned with Sir Roblis. Roblis and Paulus were speaking to one another now. Lilith struggled forward and tried to lean against the post, but with her hands bound to it, it was impossible to rest much of her weight on it. Lilith sucked in deep breaths and tried to steady herself. Her mind had mostly returned now. She was certain that Paulus was not a hallucination, so what was he _doing_ here? Did he still think she was some disgraced noble, waiting for a chance to restore her honor, prove her rightful place was in the upper classes?

Could he be _right_? Had she abandoned hope too soon? But Rurik himself knew exactly who she was, where she came from, why she was here, and it wasn't even that he didn't believe her. It just didn't matter. She was a slave. She always would be. If her parents, supporting Adelbern, condemned her, and Rurik _himself_ condemned her as well, then what could some monk say otherwise?

"I'm a...Slave," Lilith choked out, "just a...Slave." Someone began pulling off her restraints. She rocked unsteady on her feet and nearly collapsed backwards as her dropped to her sides. A hand caught her, steadied her. "I'll be good," Lilith muttered to no one, her voice thin, so quiet she wasn't entirely positive she was speaking aloud.

The hand was leading her away from the post now, out to the front of the estate, wrapped around her shoulder to keep her up, keep her moving. She staggered along beside, every fourth or fifth step missing the ground, and for a moment she'd be dragged along by him before she recovered. She was passing through the gates when she finally turned to look and see Paulus, his face blank as he half-led, half-dragged her down from the hills into the thriving heart of Ascalon City. "Why...Why are you here?" Lilith managed.

"Shut up," Paulus said. Lilith did not respond, but instead focused on walking.

The walk to Ashford Abbey was rather longer than the usual hour or so with Lilith barely capable of standing. She had begun to recover by the time they reached it, and her mind had mostly emerged from the sluggish fog through which it had struggled. If Paulus _did_ believe she had noble blood left in her yet, then what did he want from her? Certainly she didn't have any noble _influence_. He didn't bother saying anything, however. He took her to the infirmary, pulled out some bandages and patched up her wounds, than left her lying stomach down on the softest bed she'd slept on for the past year. The pain from the pendant grew worse from the pressure, but it was still better than the pain on her back. And she was too tired to change positions anyway.

She wasn't sure how long she slept. When she woke, it was still light out, and she could not see the position of the sun through the windows. For that matter, she wasn't certain exactly what time she'd arrived. She pulled herself up off the sheets, which clung briefly to her skin, soaked through with sweat. The infirmary appeared to be empty. A small favor, considering she had never had the chance to replace her shirt after her whipping. Granted, the filthy thing would have infected her wounds for sure.

The pain in her back had dulled, but the pendant dug away into her chest, dull and perpetual. She was already wondering how much more of that pain she could take and she had only had the damned thing for a day. Clutching at the pendant, she tried to tear it out of herself. She didn't care if it took a chunk of skin with it. She didn't care if it took the whole _bone_ with it, she wanted it out. The pain shot through her body, she could feel it traveling up her spine, but she only ripped at it harder. Grunting with the effort, she fell off the bed and landed on her back, screaming in pain and flinching onto her stomach.

She heard the infirmary doors flying open and she backed away almost to the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. A dozen soldiers from the Guard hobbled in, some supporting their comrades. Two of them were carried in. The worst of them were laid on or helped into beds. Mhenlo was already examining the worst of them. His hands glowed white with healing power as he sealed up the worst wounds.

"Nothing to be done for this one," Mhenlo said to one of the healthier soldiers, gesturing to one of the ones carried in, "breath's gone out of him. He's dead."

"He was breathing five minutes ago, I heard him gasping," the soldier responded, "surely there must be something you can do!"

"It makes no difference if he's gone five minutes or five years, for all that I can save him," Mhenlo said, "now remove him from my infirmary so that I will have more room for the others."

"He can't be dead just like that," the soldier insisted, and the doors, still ajar, swung open again as that new guard captain dragged a moaning man to a bed.

"Devona, please tell your men to stop telling me how to heal the injured," Mhenlo said.

"Whatever you're doing, stop it," Devona said, helping herself to the supply kits and pulling out some bandages to begin patching up her men.

"And start doing what you aren't," Mhenlo said, "remove the corpse from my infirmary, if you would."

"Listen to him," Devona said.

"Y-yes, ma'am," the soldier said. He looked down at his dead friend, whose eyes stared blankly at the ceiling. The live soldier closed the dead one's eyes, then hefted the corpse onto his shoulders and started carrying him out.

"How bad is it?" Devona asked as the doors closed behind the departing soldier.

"For most of them, not very," Mhenlo said, his hands glowing as he sealed up a vicious axe wound on a soldier's leg, "there's one or two who might not make it. Lots of blood loss and little I can do about that except hope they can make more in a hurry. What happened?"

"Finally got enough men together to clear out those bandits in the hills," Devona said, and a soldier screamed with pain as she forced his leg into a splint, "most of them green, but we had numbers, weapons, better armor, and discipline even if not experience." She looked across the wounded in their beds. "They're no heroes, Mhenlo, but they held the line. They're good men. Do what you can for them."

"When do I ever do anything less?" Mhenlo asked, irate, as he pulled off a soldier's helmet to seal up a nasty gash across his head. "What went wrong?"

"Bandits turned out in force to try and send us packing, we routed them back to their camp in the hills. So far so good, but we were ambushed by grawl when we tried to pursue," Devona said.

"_Grawl_?" Mhenlo asked, snapping the head off an arrow that had struck a soldier's upper arm. "in Lakeside County?" Devona's response was interrupted by another soldier's shout of pain as Mhenlo tore the arrow out. His screams soon subsided as Mhenlo sealed up the wound left behind.

"I don't know why they're so far from their usual territory, but with the charr rampaging just north of the wall we don't have the-" Devona was cut off.

Mhenlo had just walked past the place where Lilith sat between the beds and Mhenlo rolled not only his eyes, but most of his body from the waist up when he saw her. "Why aren't you in your bed, girl?" he said, interrupting Devona. Lilith jumped to her feet and climbed back onto the bed, pulling her knees up to her chin, and Mhenlo turned to Devona and said "please, continue."

Devona gave Lilith a quizzical look, but returned to tending the wounded soldiers as best she could without healing magic. "We don't have the men to get rid of them," Devona continued, "it's a lot like someone told the grawl we'd be distracted."

"Using small words so they'd understand, even," Mhenlo said, his breath short, "how very gracious." He steadied himself against a counter and opened a supply kit, digging through to find bandages. "I've sealed up all the major wounds," he said, "I can handle the rest myself. Is there anything else you want to tell me while you're here?"

"You don't happen to have any monks to spare for our next outing?" Devona asked.

"I have a scribe, a smiter, and two healers, counting myself," Mhenlo said. "I am needed here, the other healer is needed at the shrine on the road to the city. We can spare the smiter if all you need is a capable combatant. You can have the scribe, too, for all I care, he might make a better meatshield than he does an actual scribe."

Devona's smile was wry. "We'll take the smiter, thanks," she said, "you can keep the scribe. And if it's not too much trouble, please tell me as soon as you get a healer back south of the Wall."

"Of course," Mhenlo said, "good luck until we do." Devona nodded and left, the doors booming shut behind her. Mhenlo looked to Lilith, who was still clutching her legs, staring at him. She glanced away when he looked back. "It is a _bed_, not a _chair_, girl," Mhenlo said, taking her by the shoulders, and with a firm but surprisingly gentle grip spun her around so that she was stomach down and on the pillow again, "you do not sit on it. Now rest and keep warm," he said, yanking the blanket haphazardly on top of her. She grabbed the edges and pulled the blanket a bit tighter around herself, wincing slightly as it came into contact with the bandaged wounds on her back. Lilith wondered briefly if she should ask why they were doing this for her. Hadn't the nature of the wounds and her own pitifully ragged clothing made it obvious what she was? Did Mhenlo also think she was special somehow? Either way, Mhenlo had started ignoring her and tending the others, so Lilith decided against bothering him.

It was half an hour before Mhenlo finished patching up the nicks and minor cuts on the soldiers. "Everyone please, your attention here," he announced, standing at one end of the room, "but gods, _do not get up_, yes, thank you," one soldier had propped himself up on his elbows only to sink back down at Mhenlo's chastisement, "rest, keep warm, do not leave your beds or try to exert yourself, whatever it is you think you _must_ do I can tell you in advance, I've heard it before and it is always nonsense. Right now you're all _cripples_ and all you _must_ do is get better so you'll be able to walk without puking out your lungs. I'll be back in an hour."

Mhenlo left the room, and it was half an hour after that when Paulus the Monk returned. One of the soldiers opened his mouth to ask him something, but Paulus raised a hand to silence him. "Forgive me, sirrah, but I am not a healer. Unless there is a revenant hiding under your bed that you need smitten down, I cannot help you. Abbot Mhenlo should be back soon. Abrasive though he is, he takes good care of his patients." Paulus reached Lilith's bed and took her by the arm, pulling her out. She crossed her free arm over her chest again as he pulled her from the room.

Paulus took her through the Abbey's dark corridors to his monk's cell, where he flung open the chest and tossed her one of his spare shirts. "Get dressed," he said.

Lilith pulled the shirt over her head and asked "sir, what's going on?"

"You'll need both arms where we're going and giving you a shirt was faster than getting rid of your modesty," Paulus said, "you seem steady enough on your feet. In any case I very suddenly have somewhere else to be tomorrow so there's no time to wait. I'm taking you down to the catacombs now."

"What for?" Lilith said.

"To retrieve an artifact from an old shrine. Mhenlo said he wanted to examine it, but that catacomb is crawling with the undead," Paulus said, pulling out something long and thin wrapped in cloth from the chest, "since smiting down the undead crawling under us is the only reason this Abbey keeps me around in the first place, obviously it is my job to go and get it for him. Since I _own_ you, your job is whatever I tell you." Paulus unwrapped the object; Lilith's bone staff, the one she'd taken from the devourers' nest. He tossed it to her.

"Where...How did you-?" she asked.

"I knew you had used the staff from the bodies of the devourers in the nest when I went by to clear out the survivors," Paulus said, gesturing for Lilith to follow as he stepped into the hall. She tailed him just a pace behind and to the right. "There was no sign of any weapon at the scene and I knew it was unlikely you'd just _give up_ something that was so useful to you and which you were very unlikely to come across again. Any hiding spot in Ascalon City would be too risky because it's so densely populated that someone or other is going to stumble across it eventually, and there's only so many hiding spots within easy retrieval distance of Ashford Village. I know enough magic to know when enchantments are near, so I played the hot/cold game with that until I found it. Satisfied?"

"Oh, of course, sir, I mean," she paused, searching for the words. "You don't have to tell me anything, of course, I was just curious."

"Shut up," Paulus said, "I didn't bring you here for your sycophancy."

"Um, yes, sir," Lilith said, wondered if that was the right response to a demand to be less sycophantic, but Paulus did not respond one way or the other so she supposed it was good enough? She stepped out into the light of the Abbey's courtyard, fingers wrapped around the staff. "You...You own me?" she asked.

"Yes," Paulus said, striding across the courtyard, "you were out past sunset, officially a runaway. I found you first, and I'm a clergymen. I have the right of seizure. I told you to leave, but I never told you where to go or yielded my right to you, which was lucky. Spent the morning looking up obscure laws so I could get my hands on you."

"Why?" Lilith asked, as the two of them stepped through the massive stone doors leading down into the ruined catacombs. The stairs two-dozen feet wide, but massive jagged cracks ate away at the edges, so the two walked single-file down the center. No point in tempting fate by walking on an edge that might collapse under their weight.

"Either you are what you say you are in which case you'll die in a hurry," Paulus said, "or else you are what everyone _else_ said you were, in which case you're going to be extremely useful. Either way, the catacombs aren't a place for chit-chat, so shut up and follow me, and I _hope_ you aren't stupid enough that you need to be told to start killing dangerous things without waiting for my permission down there, but just in case."

"Yes, sir," Lilith said. Paulus did not speak further as they descended into the gloom, lighting a lantern which he handed off to her, freeing up both his hands for his sword and shield. This close to the surface, the catacombs were not nearly so mazelike as they infamously were deeper down. The corridors were broad, supported by massive pillars that stretched from the earth below to the earth above. The great highways of the necropolis. This was almost a holy site for necromancers. Lilith had dreamed of coming her to study the secrets of the dead as a girl, and now she was here, with a staff topped with children's skulls (probably). Was this _real_?

They had reached a balcony of sorts. It was, at the least, a place where the floor fell away into a chasm, and at the foot of that chasm was a vast plaza containing dozens of crypts. On the other side of this plaza was a stairway that descended down even deeper, leading to a corridor flooded by stagnant water. A shrine to the dead had been erected in an alcove at the top of the stairs. Lilith recognized it as a shrine to fallen warriors. One of which had decided to disregard the "fallen," bones in armor lurching about in a way that was decidedly atypical for bones.

Paulus was already raising his shield and preparing for a fight. Lilith set the lantern down, its powerful light providing illumination out to thirty feet, and leveled her staff with the skeleton. She fired a bolt of dark energy at it, but as it connected she realized that it would do nothing: A weapon which saps the very life essence from the target would have little effect on a corpse, after all. With the speed and precision of a trained soldier, the skeleton swung its sword towards Paulus, who knocked it aside with his shield and cut off the skeleton's head. It swung again, undaunted, and Paulus sidestepped.

Lilith summoned up the swarm from within herself, and it flew towards the skeleton to devour the flesh from its bones. The plague locusts were terribly confused when they reached their target, climbing across it to try and find something edible while it and Paulus continued trading blows. Finally, Paulus' sword, glowing with holy power, struck down the center of the creature, and it erupted into flames which burned white, and then blue, and then not at all, the smoldering ashen remains of the bones collapsing to the floor. A great banshee shriek filled the air, and Lilith dropped her staff to cover her ears.

The shriek abated. Lilith opened up her eyes again to find Paulus catching his breath. "Do they always scream like that at the end?" she asked.

"Scream like what?" Paulus asked.

"You didn't hear it?" Paulus shook his head. "It was so loud I thought my ears might start bleeding," Lilith said.

"I heard nothing," Paulus said, "and I didn't see much assistance from you, either."

"I'm sorry," Lilith said, "but I tried every trick I have and it didn't even notice."

"Every trick?" Paulus asked.

"Well, it's dead. I can't sap its life energy, can't eat the flesh off of it, can't drink its blood, can't trick it or distract it," she thought for a moment about what other tricks she'd found in her arsenal the day before, "I can't even grovel in front of it and hope it loses interest," she muttered.

"Here," Paulus said, and tossed her some tiny blue thing. Lilith caught it, an iron ring bearing a small square chiseled from pale blue stone, which itself had a signet inscribed upon it. She did not recognize exactly what it was, but they had taught her enough magic calligraphy at Nolani Academy to know it was smiting magic. "Bane signet," he said, "I don't have to teach you how to use a magic signet, do I?" Lilith shook her head. "Good, because I don't have the time. Point it at anything undead, fire it, should rip it right in half."

"Alright," Lilith said, picking up her staff and lantern again.

"That water is diseased," Paulus said, "and fairly fast-acting, too. We'll be crippled in an hour, dead within three, so we have to move quick in order to get the artifact and bring it back. Mhenlo can remove the disease once we're back at the Abbey."

Lilith swallowed, her throat suddenly very dry. "Okay," she said.

Paulus descended the stairs towards the water, Lilith following just behind him, and then took a running leap on the last landing, clearing a solid twenty feet before landing in the water. He hit the ground running, churning the knee-deep water with long strides, clumsy in the water, but quick. Lilith leapt after him, trying to imitate his gait in order to keep up.

It was difficult to keep track of time in the darkness of the catacombs, and Lilith, halfway panicked, kept losing track of the seconds. Soon enough, however, she could feel a creeping numbness through her feet, and decided that whatever disease this was, clearly it was taking hold. Another alcove to fallen soldiers, and another of them less than fallen. The corpse charged Paulus, and Lilith aimed the ring at it and triggered the spell. For a second there was nothing, but then the skeleton burned with holy fire. Hers less powerful than Paulus', it ran on and swung its sword at Paulus, who swatted the blow aside and then rammed his shield into the skeleton's chest. Weakened, it toppled over, and Paulus ran on, not bothering to finish it. Lilith followed, smacking the skeleton's arms out from under it as it struggled to its feet while she passed.

"How much farther?" Lilith asked a moment later.

"Around the corner, and a ways longer," Paulus said.

Lilith looked at the darkness ahead, impenetrable after thirty feet. "How far is the corner?" Lilith asked.

"Not too far," Paulus said, and as he spoke the shadows retreated to reveal the edge of the masonry. Up ahead, a shaft of light broke through the ceiling to illuminate a massive mural of Maxilus, a skeletal horseman of Thorn, and the patron of love and courtship. A pair of entwined lovers sat beneath his boney gaze, which somehow managed to look benevolent.

As they neared the mural, a skeletal hand shot out of the water, grabbing Paulus' ankle and dragging him under the water. Paulus struggled with the corpse beneath the water, while Lilith leveled her bane signet with it and fired again, but the holy fire was still _fire_ and would not burn underwater. Dropping her staff, she ran to the skeleton and grasped it around its boney neck, yanking it backward. Paulus cut it in half at the spine, and Lilith incinerated the top half with the signet, dropping the skeleton and screaming in pain as the fire seared her palm. The skeleton screamed as well, and Lilith could only plug her ears with the one hand, now. Her other was deafened for several seconds after shrill noise had ceased.

Paulus turned and ran on immediately while Lilith bent down to retrieve her staff, holding the lantern as high above the water as she could reach. When Lilith caught up with Paulus, he had already sheathed his sword and shield on his back and dragged the artifact, a large urn, out of the alcove that had kept it safe from the water for years. "Keep me safe," Paulus said as he began running back, "and hurry!"

Lilith's vision grew hazy before they were even halfway back through the twisting corridors. From her feet, the numb feeling had spread upwards through her entire body. Paulus had begun to stagger slightly, but Lilith was nearly careening into walls as she desperately drove herself to keep up. If she was left behind now, her only hope was that she would mercifully drown rather than the disease slowly melting her insides for the next two hours.

The skeleton Paulus had knocked beneath the waters was waiting for them near the stairs. It lurched through the water towards them. Lilith fired her signet at it, and it hissed, damp bones sizzling, but the flame didn't take. Lilith's concentration was breaking. The skeleton swung, and Paulus staggered to the side, the blade opening up a gash in his arm. Lilith caught up to the fight a moment later and swung the lantern into the skeleton. It staggered backwards, the lantern shattering and lighting the bones on fire. Lilith ran, as much from the familiar banshee wail as from the burning bones and the blade it wielded. Paulus was behind her, now, though just barely. They had turned the corner to the stairs, but the light from the lantern extinguished when the skeleton collapsed beneath the water. Their way was lit now only by the green glow of Lilith's staff.

Lilith found the stairs and began climbing up them. Every time she reached a landing her foot want careening through the air before it found the ground unexpectedly eight inches lower than she had expected. She could hear Paulus fumbling up the stairs somewhere behind her. When she reached the top, she staggered to the right and found the wall. "Paulus," she said, not even sure why, following the wall. She was reasonably certain she could make out natural light at the end of the necropolitan highway, but she could hardly move now.

The pillars were the only reason she could keep moving, now. She collapsed from one to another, pulled herself up, then collapsed to the next. She had finally reached the natural light at the end of the corridor when she collapsed again, crawled a half-dozen feet towards the stairs leading up to the Abbey's courtyard, and then found her strength exhausted. A burning pain was spreading through her body, but that was hardly new. The pain in her back still had not abated much, and the pain in her chest would _never_ go away.

Someone crouched down beside her. A woman. Dark hair. Leather armor, but not much of it. "What the _Hell _are you doing in here?" she demanded.

"Paulus," Lilith said, and gestured towards the darkness behind her, "back there. Dying."

The woman squinted into the corridor and raced off into the gloom. Lilith's stomach churned as she saw her dragging Paulus back towards the Abbey. By the time the woman came back for her, she was vomiting up black bile. By the time she reached the surface, she blacked out completely.


	8. Rites of Remembrance

Lilith was less fond of the catacombs now than she had been before. Mhenlo purged the plague from her a solid hour before it reached its final and fatal stage, but it turned out just getting _close_ to dying was enough to turn her off from visiting the hallowed heart of necromantic knowledge. It's not as though she would ever be permitted to _learn_ anything here.

She had spent most of the last week in the Abbey, where Mhenlo had put her to work mostly watching patients in case something went wrong while Mhenlo was busy with clerical duties or washing the blood off of things. Mhenlo had told her that he was entirely capable of whipping her until she was near dead, healing her up, and then handing her back over to Paulus as though nothing had happened if one of Mhenlo's patients died from infection because she hadn't washed something thoroughly enough, or put the dirty instruments where the clean ones were supposed to be, or happened to be in the same room when it happened. On the bright side, Mhenlo seemed to stop being irritated with her for nearly ten seconds when she told him that she had completed a year of schooling at Nolani Academy and did not need to be told why keeping surgical tools clean was a good idea.

Lilith had kept her staff. She wasn't allowed to even bring it into the same wing of the Abbey as the infirmary, but Mhenlo said he was not particularly concerned about the possibility of a witch with a single year of education trying to drain the life out of people in the same building as one of the most esteemed masters of life energy manipulation in the entire Kingdom of Ascalon, who also happened to be personal friends with the new captain of the Ashford Guard. "Feel free to attack whoever you like," Mhenlo had said, "it's been so long since I've seen a good hanging."

Paulus had actually thanked her for helping him retrieve the artifact. Sort of. "I wouldn't have made it back alive without you," he had said. The gratitude was there, the thanks were implied.

"It's what I'm here for," Lilith had responded. Lilith had very cautiously inquired if, seeing as how he fully intended her to use what witchcraft she had on his behalf, he would mind her learning any more of it. He had said he would look into finding some way for her to learn more, but then had not mentioned it again for the entire rest of the week. Lilith was now reasonably certain that he had looked into it, found it was too much trouble, and decided against bringing it up again.

Besides the part where she had nearly been killed, the last week had been the best thing to happen to Lilith in the entire year she had been a slave. The Abbey was nearly deserted. When Paulus wasn't patrolling with Devona, trying to keep the village safe from bandits and ever-bolder grawl raiders in light of their reduced force, he was usually training or studying, and in either case didn't pay much attention to her. Mhenlo was constantly stalking about and seemed irritated by the very fact that she existed, but then he also seemed irritated that the soldiers were still in their beds, that they were trying to leave those beds before fully healing, that they took up _so many _beds, that another one came in every few days from Devona's patrols and two or three of the beds would probably be occupied indefinitely, that Meerak didn't do more scribework, that the scribework Meerak did required so much revising, that Paulus hadn't gotten the artifact sooner, that Paulus refused to put it back where he found it when Mhenlo finished examining it, that the Abbey had so few healers, that the healers the Abbey had before were so incompetent, and really everything else, ever. Mhenlo did not speak often, but every single thing she had heard him say involved some kind of expression of irritation for the way things were, had been, or would be in the future.

It was a big Abbey, though, and avoiding Mhenlo was easy. He'd walk in the room, glare, and she'd either deliver whatever message she had from the infirmary or focus on cleaning things and usually he wouldn't bother saying anything at all to her. Despite his dire threat of what should happen if she should ever fail to do her job right, Mhenlo didn't feel the need to constantly reinforce that threat the way the Roblis family had. She had forgotten what it was like to not be afraid all the time.

Of course, now she was headed back down into the catacombs, staff clutched in her hands, and was reasonably certain that she was going to be afraid again in the very near future. Nothing's perfect. "So," she ventured, "where are we going today?"

"To see a friend," Paulus said.

"Is it dangerous, or am I just here to serve dinner or as a status symbol or something?" Lilith asked.

"Probably dangerous," Paulus said, "you remember the woman who dragged our diseased bodies up into the Abbey for Mhenlo to heal?"

"Yes," Lilith said.

"Well, we're going to go repay the favor," Paulus said, "Her name is Munne, and she's a member of the necromantic order that keeps the undead threat contained to the catacombs. An ally of the Abbey, but not one of us. When she does something for us, we have to do something for her. Way it works down here."

The trip was short. Munne lived just past the stairs into the catacombs, in a ruined chapel just to the side. She had restored a small section of it to live in, and it seemed a well-stocked and comfortable place to be. There were even enough holes in the roof of the chapel and the corridor outside that the place had enough natural light to go around.

The necromancer was drinking tea whilst sitting in one of the shafts of sunlight that shone down from above. "Paulus the Monk," Munne said, "to what do I owe the pleasure?"

"I'm here to repay the favor you've done me," Paulus said, "I would have come sooner but I was needed with the Ashford Guard to help fend off some grawl. The surface has been quiet the past few days, so I'm free to fulfill my obligations below it."

"Oh, good, I was beginning to worry you wouldn't be coming" Munne said, placing her teacup down on the table in front of her. "Care to join me?"

"Only if you don't mind," Paulus said, "I came here to repay you a favor in the first place, after all."

"It's fine," she took one of the empty teacups on the tray, flipped it rightside up, and offered it to him. Paulus took it and sat down at the table, pouring himself a cup of the tea, still steaming hot. Lilith waited behind him. She might have quietly cursed Munne for daring to pass her up for a cup, once, but her recent attack of perspective told her to be grateful that she was as well-off as she was.

"Thank you," Palus said, "but as I said earlier, I have come to repay the favor. The catacombs being what they are, I assume you have something a smiting monk might be able to help you with?"

Munne's eyes glanced upward in thought. "I'm sure I could think of something," she said, "there's that skeleton horde brewing around the pit, but I think that might be Oberan's pet project and there's no need to provoke him. There's something going on in the old temple near the Green Hills County entrance, but someone else is already looking into it."

"Sounds like the catacombs are quieter than normal," Paulus said.

"Well, Oberan has been using his considerable abilities for something other than self-aggrandizement for once," Munne said, thought a second, and then said "no, that's not true. He's using his considerable abilities for self-aggrandizement and for once that happens to include doing his actual job. I haven't seen the dark forces at the heart of this labyrinth so quiet...Well, ever."

"Then you really don't have anything I could help with?" Paulus said, "I'm almost disappointed. I hate to let a debt go unpaid."

"Well, that isn't entirely true. There's actually something going wrong quite near here, but there's not much you can do to help," Munne said, "quite frankly, you're the problem in the first place and I do not think the spirits would appreciate seeing you again."

Paulus grimaced. "Oh. Did I disturb something on my last expedition?"

"Yes. The departed spirits you lit on fire were rather disturbed by the experience," Munne said.

"Those weren't evil spirits?" Paulus asked.

"Well, depending on how you define evil," Munne said, "I'm sure all the people they killed in the Sect Wars wouldn't think much of them, but then, they fought that war so Thorn worshipers like us could drink tea in a haunted catacomb without fear of being terrorized. By the living."

"Those were the departed spirits of Ascalonian soldiers," Paulus said.

"Well, you didn't think it was coincidence that they all haunted shrines to fallen soldiers, did you?" Munne asked.

"I...Suppose I wasn't much thinking about it," Paulus said, "I am not an expert in the dead, Necromancer Munne. I apologize."

"Clearly not, or else you would have heard their terrified shrieks when you cut them down when they made known their irritation at our negligence," Munne said, "unfortunately with the recent shipment of fresh new corpses from north of the Wall and my latest apprentice vanished into the labyrinth, I find I don't quite have time for every shrine anymore."

"Your apprentice is gone?" Paulus asked.

"Yes, I suspect he ran into Oberan and was seduced by his deviant perspective," Munne said, "I imagine Oberan will sacrifice him to some demon or other within a week or two."

"Perhaps I can placate these spirits," Paulus said, "I may not be able to hear or see them, but if you told me what they want I could do the legwork."

"What they want is different each day," Munne said, "the work of a grave watcher is to ask and then deliver. If you can't hear them, you wouldn't be much help."

"I can hear them," Lilith said.

Munne looked to her and raised an eyebrow. "She can," Paulus said, "those shrieks you mentioned, at least. She mentioned it when last we were down here. Startled her a bit."

"You can," Munne said, "and did you hear anything else? Threats? Demands? Pleas for mercy?"

Lilith tried to remember if she had. She was terrified at the time, especially towards the end when the disease was taking hold. Maybe there was something faint she'd heard and ignored at the time...? But she knew that she was just trying fabricate a memory to make herself feel important, now. "No, miss," she said, "just the screams."

"Well, it's a start," Munne said. She sat up from where she was seated and walked over to a cabinet, retrieving four candles from within it. "Here," she said, handing them to Lilith, "there are four shrines along the Sect War corridor. Light one candle at each altar, and ask the spirits how you might placate their wrath. They may be angry, especially since you were with the one who hacked them to pieces. Do try to stay out of harm's way, but don't, whatever you do, _don't_ harm them or their physical manifestations. If you do I can promise you a much more painful end than being hacked to pieces by angry spirits. Understand?"

"Yes, miss Munne," Lilith said, wishing she had kept her mouth shut.

"Good," Munne said, "you seem to be barely able to hear the spirits, so listen very carefully once the candle is lit."

"Yes, miss Munne, but, uh..." Lilith trailed off.

"But what?" Munne asked.

"That's the corridor flooded with plague water, isn't it?" Lilith asked, "it'll kill me."

"And should I be particularly concerned if you die?" Munne asked.

"Well, I suppose not, but I'm not going to die after I'm done. I'm going to die halfway through," Lilith said, "then you'll have to do the rest yourself."

"True enough," Munne said, and considered a moment. She brushed a strand of Lilith's hair away from her face, and Lilith nearly flinched. "What's this?" she asked, trailing her fingers along the dark scar on Lilith's face.

"It's from a long time ago," Lilith said.

"That doesn't answer my question," Munne said.

"No, miss, I apologize. It's a witch glyph inscribed permanently into the skin. It makes it easier to commune with the dead and other creatures attuned with it," Lilith said, "it's not something I...I wasn't always a slave."

"You made it yourself?" Munne said.

"Yes, but I was allowed, back then," Lilith said.

"What I care about, girl, is do you have past experience working with the dead?" Munne asked.

"Well, no, but I studied," Lilith said.

Munne scrutinized her. "Then you are familiar with decorporealization?"

_Normal people call it ghost walking, you pretentious bitch,_ Lilith thought, but said aloud "yes, miss, I am."

"Ever tried it before?" Munne asked.

"No," Lilith said.

"Then this will be a learning experience," Munne said, "lie down."

"Um. Okay," Lilith said, lowering herself to the floor.

"What is this?" Munne asked, tapping the pendant still latched onto Lilith's chest, which, as ever, dug into her.

"A curse, miss," Lilith said, "it just...Hurts. All the time."

"Hm," Munne said, hovering her hand over it, "good thing it's a simple one. Should be easy to work with."

"Can you get rid of it?" Lilith asked.

"No, and I'm not the one here to do a favor, am I?" Munne asked. Lilith opened her mouth to respond, but Munne said "be quiet, girl, and empty your thoughts. Lilith lay still. She knew how to do this: She focused only on her breathing. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. It was a good thing the Academy taught this in the-Oh dammit, not supposed to be thinking, breathe in, what if Munne decided she wasn't good enough to-this was not helping, breathe out. Breathe in. But _dammit_ it was so hard to not think when she was terrified and the pain in her chest was _not helping_.

"Relax," Munne said, "I won't hurt you for having a crowded mind. If only because it would be counterproductive."

It took another five minutes solid before Lilith managed to clear her mind properly. The hum of background noise, the cold stone beneath her, for a moment even the pendant drilling into her collarbone faded into a simple static, and for a time, she could feel blissful nothing. An inviting darkness guided her through reality, and when she opened her eyes, she found herself staring down at her own body.

"She's out," Munne said, "she'll have to make do without the candles, I suppose. Can't carry them as a ghost." Was Lilith's face really _that_ badly damaged? And the rest of her hardly looked better. Her hair was growing stringy, her nose was still crooked from when Devona broke it last week, her skin had turned an angry red surrounding the pendant, and her clothes (if you could call them that) did not flatter her figure _or_ make her look remotely respectable.

"Is she dead?" Paulus asked, and Lilith was again hit with the perspective that things _could_ still be worse.

"No," Munne said, "watch." Munne pulled off one of the leather strips from her armor and whipped it across Lilith's shoulder. Lilith yelped and clutched at her ghostly shoulder while a welt started forming on her physical form, which stirred slightly. She could almost feel the stone beneath her again for a moment, but then it was gone and her body lay still again. "We can drag her back this way if we have to," Munne said.

"I didn't even do anything wrong," Lilith said, rubbing uselessly at her ghost shoulder. She couldn't actually feel her hand there anyway, and even the welt was fading faster than normal.

"You haven't done anything right, either," Munne said, and Lilith jumped a foot in the air, and then discovered she didn't have anything in particular to bring her back down. "Of course I can see you," Munne said, "talking to disembodied spirits is my _job_. Now listen, you won't have much luck with the candles, so you'll have to get their attention on your own. Your incorporeal form will protect you from the plague and should also make it easier to see the spirits. You've disturbed four altars. Calm the spirits at each of them and then return here."

"Um, yes, miss, is that all?" Lilith asked.

"It is, get going," Munne said.

"Wait," Paulus said, grabbing the candles, "the first altar was outside the water, and I can make it to the second and back with plenty of time to spare. I'll light the candles for those two. The next you'll have to gather up on your own."

"Thank you, sir," Lilith said.

"He can't hear you," Munne said, "you'll have to snuff the candle for him to let him know you've finished and are ready to move on. It's the first trick a ghost learns, I'm sure you'll figure it out. Now _go_."

Lilith took an experimental step towards the wall, and found she could walk on air as easily as she could on land. Then she tried keeping her legs still and simply drifting straight through the wall, and found herself headed straight for it. She closed her eyes and braced for impact, but then she was on the other side and hadn't felt anything at all. Couldn't feel anything at all. Not the cold air, not the stone floor, and not the pendant, either.

She followed Paulus as he wound his way towards the Sect War corridor. The passages below were as impressive as ever, but now Lilith could sense others. They teased at the edge of her consciousness, faces in the dark that were no longer there when she turned to focus on them. But she _knew_ they were here. They walked this road. They crept from one pillar to the next. This was their place, the city of the dead. She wondered if they had jobs. Master moaner? Head spook?

They arrived at the altar. Paulus lit the candle and then sat cross-legged in front of the altar, waiting. Lilith could hear already, though, a presence approaching. A ghostly soldier walked towards him. Stalked towards him. As he drew near to Paulus, the ghost raised his sword high, but Lilith stepped in front and said "wait, wait, don't do that!"

The ghost halted in mid-blow, scrutinized her, and vanished. A distant whispering welled up inside her. It was not something she heard, but something emanated from within, as though they were her own thoughts, except they leapt unbidden from within her. She closed her eyes, and focused. _You don't belong here_, she could make out, _you fought no war._

"I'm alive," Lilith said, "and I'm here to make amends on behalf of the living."

The whispering filled her ears again, angry and threatening. Demanding something. Demanding retribution.

"We've been distracted," Lilith said, "the surface villages are half-empty to fight north of the Wall and the fresh bodies keep coming in. We're here to make amends now."

The ghost wrapped its hands around her throat, and _that_ Lilith could feel, her breath short, her body choking, and though the ghost's face looked human, the vicelike grip on her neck was bone. Lilith choked, and struggled to understand it before it killed her. Distantly she could make out _you'll do._

"No," Lilith choked out, "please, I'm here to help! I didn't even have this job until half an hour ago and I came straight here! I'm not the offering, I'm here to bring you the offering!" The ghost's grip tightened. She could hardly breathe. "You'll get more if...If you let me be...Your messenger!" The ghost considered her for a moment, then released his grip on her. Lilith hacked and coughed and sank to her knees. "Thank you," she said, "thank you, what do you need? What do you..." Lilith racked her mind, she knew she had learned _something_ about this back in Rin, but she had honestly just considered this part to be putting in the hours so she could learn how to make corpses hack her enemies apart for her. "Sacrifice," she said, "you require a sacrifice, right? What do you want? Food? Treasure?"

The whispers no longer stung so far at the edge of her conscious mind. Teasing out the meaning was getting easier. _Thief!_ was certainly coming through clear. "When?" Lilith asked, but the only response was _thief! Thief! Thief!_ "What did they take?" Lilith asked. It wasn't sound that came now, but a vision. A badge of honor. A small pile of them, really. They had decorated the altar, and they appeared to be made of gold, a rare prize for a grave robber. Lilith breathed out a sigh of relief, glad it wasn't the urn she and Paulus had gone to retrieve the week before.

"We'll find who stole it, and we'll get it back," Lilith said, "I promise." Lilith did not have to concentrate to hear the screams of rage. They were deafening. "I can't give it back _now_, I don't have it!" Lilith said, and then flinched as the bony claw ripped across her face, leaving three long scratches across her cheek.

Lilith slid to her knees on the stone floor, briefly grateful that she wasn't corporeal and therefore couldn't scrape her skin off on it, and began focusing on the candle. The enraged wailing grew louder behind her. "Come on," she said, trying to pinch the candle out. Paulus was unmoving next to her, probably meditating. "Come on, go out, go out already," Lilith said, trying to focus her will on the candle. Munne said that this was an easy trick to pick up but she didn't say how she would actually _do_ it.

The hands clawed at her back while the banshee wailing grew even louder, tearing long gashes from shoulder to hip. Lilith flinched and desperately waved her hands through the candle. The flame flickered and died, and Paulus' eyes popped open. She wasn't sure how he could be perceptive enough to hear the candle's flame going out but not hear the chorus of hatred giving the performance of their unlives, but he was up and moving down the stairs, and Lilith ran after him, batting away at phantom hands that tugged and scratched at her arms.

Paulus leapt into the plague water and sprinted down the corridor. Though it had seemed ages to reach it the first time, Lilith knew it was only a few minutes to the next altar. The spirits did not follow them past the stairs, leaving them in blissful silence as Paulus, shivering with the first symptoms of the plague's return, set the candle into the altar and lit it. "Good luck," he said, and turned to run to the exit.

Paulus' splashing faded into the distance. Lilith closed her eyes and concentrated, waiting for the ghosts to make themselves known. She thought she could feel them, now, lurking in the distance. "Are you there?" Lilith asked. "I'm here to help. Some of these altars have been robbed. We need to know if yours was one of them so we can return what was taken from you."

The attack was very straightforward, this time. A spectral presence leaped out towards her and filled her with panic and knowledge that yes, their badges had _also_ been stolen. "Okay!" Lilith said, backing away, "okay, we'll fix it!" And then she turned and fled down the corridor.

"Okay," she said, catching breath she hadn't lost, "okay, just hit and run. If they all have the same problem I can just pop in, confirm, and be gone before they can rip me to pieces." She could not see, but she did not have to. She could feel the concentrations of ghosts, knew where the next altar was, and could feel in the distance a churning maelstrom of angered ghosts. Even from a distance of several miles it made her want to run further away. And this was when the catacombs were _calm_?

Regardless, she found her way to the third altar. This one had _not _been disturbed when she and Paulus had been here last, or at least, none of the spirits had possessed any remains to try and murder the two of them. "Okay, no candle," Lilith said, and closed her eyes. _If I can feel you, you can feel me,_ she thought. "I'm here as a messenger," she said aloud, "from the living to the dead. We know many of you have been wronged. If anyone has dishonored your memory, tell me, so that I can bring the message to my masters and they will see that justice is done." Slowly, a form coalesced from the air in front of her. This soldier's face had been mauled. Another behind him had his flesh burned away. A third had an arrow sticking from her eye. They all seemed very _fresh_. "H-have you been robbed?" Lilith asked.

"You don't belong here," the maimed man said.

"I only want to know if you have any desires to make known to the mortal world," Lilith said, "then I promise I'll leave as fast as I can."

"Stay," the burned man said, "stay forever."

"If I don't go back," Lilith said, backing away, "they won't receive any message from you. O-or from the other spirits!"

"Trespassers come, trespassers go," the shot woman said, "but none may go. Those who come, stay. There must be sacrifice."

There could be substitutions, Lilith remembered. "There will be," Lilith said, "but not now. I'm only one. Just please have patience and we will bring you a greater offering, one more worthy of the wrongs done to you by our negligence."

"Stay," the burned man said. Other ghosts coalesced behind him, a macabre army. They clutched at Lilith's hands as she turned to run. "Stay!" they shouted behind her, "stay, stay, stay!" But their voices faded into the distance as she ran. The hit and run technique seemed to be working out alright.

One altar left. Lilith focused herself again. "Were you robbed?" she asked. "Why do you stir from your sleep?" The altar was quiet. Lilith waited. "What's wrong?" she asked. The dead had tried to drag Paulus beneath the waters last time, they were certainly irritated about _something_. "My masters will set it right, but only if they know your desires." She _knew_ they were here. She could feel them. She could feel a lingering pain. The pain, she realized, from the bane signet she had seared them with the week before. Had it _still_ not healed? Could ghosts even _be_ permanently wounded? "I...I'm sorry," she said, "for attacking you. I was foolish and didn't know the sacrifice you had made for our kingdom. Please, tell me how to make it right. Tell me why you were so angry that day."

_Leave us_, the words came. She could feel memory at the edge of her consciousness. They were...The least of the army? The others had hated them...But not on the field of battle. No, that was what made it worse, she realized. They had been a bit weaker than the other soldiers. A bit slower. But they fought together, lived together, died together. But down here, the others blamed them. Blamed them for lives cut short, for legacies cut off forever. _Leave us leave us LEAVE US! _Lilith plugged her ears, but it did not make the shouts any quieter. Bony claws slashed at her calves, rising up out of the ground and reaching towards the soft flesh of her stomach. She fled; she might not need her organs _now_, but she didn't want to be rid of them just yet.

She was able to use the altars as way points to find her way back to the main corridors, though she kept her distance from the angry spirits. She found her still body, and found the floor beneath her covered in blood from her newest wounds; blood dribbled from her cheeks and oozed at a steady rate from her back, and a new puddle was beginning to accumulate at her feet. And the pendant still turned on her chest. Lilith sucked in a deep breath, braced herself for impact, and lay back onto the ground within her body, trying to find sensation again. It didn't take long. Feeling screamed back into her, half her body demanding her full attention. She screamed and popped off the ground. The gash on her back had reopened several the vast array of wounds left by the whipping last week. Her efforts to get to her feet saw her shot through with renewed pain in her calves, and sent her down to the ground again. The piercing pain of her fresh wounds only made worse the dull, bitter agony of the pendant on her chest. She was sick of it and she would never _stop_ being sick of it and she just wanted it gone so she didn't have to quite literally agonize over it all the time. "Please make it stop," she said, almost sobbing as a new wave of pain shot through her back and legs.

"What did they say? Did you reach all of them?" Munne demanded.

"Please," Lilith said, "it hurts so much."

"_What did they say?_" Munne asked, grabbing Lilith by the chin and glaring at her.

Lilith stared back for a moment, opened her mouth to protest, reconsidered, and then said "th-they said...They'd been robbed. The first two said they'd been robbed. Badges of honor made from gold...Taken by some thief. The third had b-been trespassed and demanded sacrifice...At least two, human sacrifices."

"And the fourth?" Munne said.

"The fourth...The fourth just wanted to be left alone," Lilith said, breath shuddering from pain, "the others...Used to be their friends. But resent them now. Blame them for how they all died. They just...Want to be left alone."

"It's a good thing they're furthest from the entrance, then," Munne said, "we can ignore them."

"But-" Lilith started. Munne turned to her and raised an eyebrow. "N-never mind, miss, of course you know best."

"Speak," Munne said.

"Well," Lilith said, wondered briefly if it was a trap, but even if it was better to speak and get it over with than anger her with refusal. "They gave their lives just like everyone else," Lilith said, "they were no less willing to die for Ascalon, and they proved it. And we're just going to...Forget them? Leave them alone with their misery forever?"

"Surely if you felt their spirits without the candles, you felt also the darkness breeding down here," Munne said.

"Y-yes," Lilith said. She could feel it even now, an ancient hatred festering in the distance.

"Then you know that we must focus our efforts on containing that threat, and any spirit content simply to brood in the dark is not our concern," Munne said, "if their rage will not grow, it will not join the storm. The same is not true for others."

"But..." she immediately regretted saying it, but now Munne looked at her, expectant. Demanding. "But they're the only ones who remember their loyalty to Ascalon," Lilith said, "they're the only ones who won't join the forces against this kingdom out of spite. Why would we be least willing to thank them, and placate traitors instead?"

"Because only the traitors will betray us if they are not placated," Munne said. Lilith rose unsteadily to her feet. "I confess myself disappointed," Munne said.

"Disappointed?" Lilith said, eyes widening.

"Four altars you visited. Four enraged spirits, wronged by their living countrymen, you were sent to pacify. And you feel sympathy for only one?" Munne said, "a true witch has empathy for all the dead. Even the ones she must abandon or destroy. If you do not understand them, you cannot control them."

"I'm...Forgive me, miss, I'm just a slave," Lilith said, "not a witch."

"Whatever made you think they were mutually exclusive categories?" Munne asked, and before Lilith could respond, said "get out of my house already, you're bleeding all over everything. Get one of those Abbey monks to fix you up."


	9. The Necromancer's Novice

Munne woke her late in the evening. Lilith cracked open her exhausted eyes, and sat bolt upright when she saw who it was. Lilith had been moved into one of the many empty monk cells in the Abbey a few days after her arrival, which was fortunate as at least now Paulus wouldn't be woken up with her. Lilith crossed her legs and asked "miss Munne, can I, uh, do something for you?"

Munne stood and looked down on her, which was hardly unusual considering how short Lilith was, though the three feet of height between the two meant that Munne absolutely towered above her. Lilith had never taken up sleeping on the bed even though she had one to herself; the barely-padded stone slabs the monks of this particular Abbey slept on as part of their asceticism were only moderately more comfortable than the floor, and something deep inside Lilith was scared of growing used to sleeping in a bed like a regular person only to have it taken away from her again. "Miss Munne?" Lilith asked. The Necromancer had still not responded.

"Fully awake?" she asked.

"Close to it," Lilith said, "why are you here? Um, that is, if I may ask."

"I'm here for you," Munne said, "come."

"Y-yes, Miss Munne," Lilith said, getting to her feet.

"Gather up your belongings, you won't be back for some time," Munne said.

Lilith swallowed. She knew it was strange for clergy to own slaves. Were they finally pawning her off to a noble, or just sacrificing her? No, they wouldn't tell her to gather her belongings if they were just going to kill her. In any case, she picked up her staff and the two spare changes of clothes kept in the chest at the foot of her unused bed and said "this is it, miss Munne, I'm...I'm ready to leave whenever."

"Good, come," Munne said.

Munne led Lilith towards the catacombs. "A grave watcher works mostly at night," Munne explained, "the dead hate the sun. It blinds them. Burns some of them away entirely. It is necessary to be able to converse with the ghosts above the earth as well as below it when we need to. Get used to rising with the moon. So long as you're with me, you're on my schedule."

Lilith had always preferred night to day. "Yes, miss Munne, but...Why am I with you again?" she asked.

"You wanted to help in the catacombs, and now you're getting your wish," Munne said, "you wanted to learn witchcraft and you're getting that, too. Is there a third wish I should know about?"

"I...What?" Lilith asked.

"You're very lucky to have impressed me with your work at the fourth altar, girl, why don't just keep your mouth shut and see how long you can ride that impression?" Munne said. Lilith opened her mouth, nearly responded, but then her half-exhausted mind caught up with the rest of her and she closed her mouth again, settling for a nod. "Good. Mhenlo thinks you'll be more useful as a properly trained witch. I agree. He's agreed to lend you to me to see you trained. He's also agreed not to hold me responsible should I be displeased enough with your work as to feed you to the gargoyles. Oh, don't look like that, girl, keep up the work you've been doing and you'll be fine." They were descending into the catacombs now, towards Munne's house in the ruined chapel. "These next few weeks, I shall teach you whatever basics your...Spotty training hasn't filled in for you already. Starting with, what _have_ you learned already?"

Lilith wondered briefly if she should still be riding the good impression and keeping quiet, but failing to answer a direct question was probably a horrible idea. So, of course, she stumbled over her words and babbled incoherently for a few seconds. "It's a straightforward question," Munne said, "just tell me how many holes I have to fill in, gods, it's not like I'm expecting much from a slave."

"I-I was a noble," Lilith said, "I went to Nolani Academy for a year. I know how to meditate, I can read some basic glyphs, plus I can read the standard alphabet, I know...Well, an awful lot of history and enunciation and other things that aren't terribly important to witchcraft. I can play the flute."

"Glyphs and meditation," Munne said, "is that all?"

"No, there's also the plague locusts, and I have the fangs, and...Well, I've mostly gotten the hang of sensing ghosts. I can hear them now, actually. They're far off," Lilith said. They had reached the entrance to the chapel.

"It's always louder at night," Munne said, "for those who can hear anyway. Can you spoil blood or channel it, place curses, raise the undead?"

"No," Lilith said.

"Didn't think so," Munne said, "you'll have to learn. These are basic concepts for practical witchcraft. That," she pointed to the priest's chambers in the ruins of the chapel, "is my room. This is the kitchen, over there is the study. The rest of the building is unoccupied. Pick a room. I don't care which, so long as it's in the chapel."

"Uh, that one looks-" Lilith began.

"I said I don't care," Munne said, "for tonight you will go light the candles between here and the Temple of Thorn. The spirits there are a reliable core of devoted Thorn worshipers, my main source of support in the catacombs. Light the candles, let them know they're remembered for me, while I sort out the situation in the Sect War corridor. It should get your sleep schedule adjusted. Tomorrow night we can begin the real work." Munne did not bother asking if Lilith had any questions before spinning on her heel and leaving the chapel, so it was a good thing she didn't.

Lilith gathered up the candles, lit one on the lantern in Munne's home, stuck the rest in a satchel, and headed out towards the Temple. The path was fortunately quite clearly marked, being one of the only places the living who were _not_ grave watchers went to with any regularity. Or at least had in the old days. There were places to worship Thorn on the surface, of course, but Hallow's Eve was dedicated to the dead, and people had used to visit the catacombs regularly on that night, back when they were maintained. The signs pointing the way were from a century ago before that dark maelstrom had grown up in the heart of the catacomb. Once the Sect Wars had started decades and decades ago, the kingdom's population slowly stretched thin. Lacking grave watchers, the most ancient spirits in the heart of Ascalon's vast catacomb grew angry, violent, and bitter. Ultimately they had coalesced into this, a beacon of terror that sat and gnawed at the back of Lilith's mind every second of every day, a poltergeist that spanned three counties and which contained more spirits than the entire living population of the kingdom above it. The grave watchers had a new duty, now, not one of honoring the dead, but of containing them.

Lilith dug out the burned out stubs of the old candles at the first altar, replacing them with fresh ones and lighting them one by one. "I'm sorry I don't know your names," she said to the faint ghostly presence she could feel around it, "I didn't have time to learn today, but I'm sure it's the first thing Munne will teach me. I guess I'm her apprentice, now." She smiled, and then for a moment was terrified that this couldn't possibly real, that at any minute she would wake up and be back at the Roblis Estate, or that tomorrow Munne would change her mind and send her back to the Abbey, and they'd sell her off to some new noble family. Or maybe Munne would just sacrifice her to appease some angry spirits.

Her hands shook, and the flame on her candle sputtered and died. Lilith took a deep breath and lit her candle on one of the altar's. If she wanted to stay where she was, the obvious first step was to do a good job with the first task she'd been given, and she wouldn't do any better by worrying about what would happen if she failed. Or if Munne just didn't like her.

As it turned out, Munne did not reject her that day, nor the day after. She did not say much, only took Lilith with her to ask the spirits of the Temple Corridor if they had been properly honored. When they said they had, Munne gave Lilith a single nod of approval and led her back to the chapel. Lilith was exhausted by that time, having only slept three hours, and was more than grateful to return to sleep as the sun rose, finding a sturdy pew in the chapel and clearing away the dust and debris to make a bed. If there were rats down here, and Lilith imagined there were, she didn't want them nibbling on her while she slept.

The names of the dead were indeed the first thing Munne taught her. The names of those in the Temple Corridor, and of the friendly spirits in the Labyrinth, which was a hotly contested region between the spirits of the maelstrom and those still friendly to Ascalon. This was not an assignment Lilith was fond of, and involved a lot of terrified fleeing from the angry spirits when they trespassed into the friendly spirits' territory, to say nothing of the constant fear that she might take a wrong turn and run straight into the poltergeist. The Labyrinth led straight into the Pit, the heart of the great maelstrom. Just being so close to it quietly terrified her.

From Munne, she learned that Oberan the Reviled made his home there, communing with the spirits of the maelstrom, sustaining himself on their hatred and spite. The other grave watchers did not know how he had managed to become accepted by them, and he no longer considered himself a friend of Ascalon (though, fortunately, he did not consider himself their foe, either), and so did not tell. Recently, however, the maelstrom churned and turned upon itself, which Munne gathered from snippets of conversation with Oberan was due to him. The spirits were enraged by war, but they were enraged by everything, so the only real difference is that their rage was directed inward.

She had also learned how to spoil an enemy's blood, making it run foul and slowly poisoning them from within, and, at last, the hallmark of the witch, the reason for which they were called _necromancers_: the summoning of bone horrors to serve her. The spirits of the dead, Lilith learned, were sacrosanct and to be honored. They were powerful and everyone joined them in time. But their remains were just flesh and bone like any other, and twisting them into servants and war machines was not just allowed, it was encouraged.

"A weak necromancer, or a stupid one, might simply animate a corpse and be done with it," Munne said, raising up a shambling minion with a gesture. It staggered up to its feet and clutched a sword with numb hands. "This is foolish. Even an untrained opponent has serious advantage over a minion that tries to fight like a man." The zombie lurched towards Lilith and pulled back to swing its sword to her, and Lilith's eyes widened in surprise while she ducked under it. "Further, the rotting process makes them weak, and the lack of _elan vital _makes them clumsy in ways we do not yet fully understand," Munne said, while her minions continued its clumsy attack on Lilith, who backed away from each blow and finally struck its kneecap the bottom of her stuff. It collapsed, and then began crawling toward her, feebly trying to swing its sword at her from the ground until Munne called it off and waited for it to expire.

"Certain rituals can animate vast armies, and there is simply no time to custom-build a thousand corpses to be proper killing machines," Munne continued, "these rituals are costly, but at times, effective, and terrifyingly so. It is from here that the popular image of the necromancer in command of a vast army of recognizably human corpses comes. However in the vast majority of cases, you will be better off with a small amount of personalized minions."

She opened up another cabinet in the catacomb and slid out another corpse, fresh from the north just a few days ago. "I'll do this slow so you can observe, but I'll only do it once, so pay attention." Munne pulled a ritual knife from her belt and began slicing off pieces of the corpse, carved various glyphs into its skin, sewed other bits and pieces on. She hacked off the left hand, used a glyph to extend the radius and ulna of the forearm, fused them together, then used the knife to whittle and sharpen the hunk of bone into a massive blade. "The human body can do a million things and all of them well, but without the animating spirit a body is clumsy. An undead minion should focus its efforts on doing one thing as best as it can, for even when so specialized it will hardly be adequate."

The head she cut off, and turned the ribcage into a massive set of vicious jaws that emerged from the stump of the neck, facing forward and hunching the whole thing over slightly. "Posture doesn't matter to the dead, nor does a creature with no spirit to see or hear have any need for eyes and ears. Remember, the undead are not like the swarms that live within us. They are not living creatures and have no volition of their own, not even an animal intelligence. They are extensions of your will, appendages. They are not attached to you and mercifully we cannot feel when they are hacked to pieces, but nevertheless your minions are best thought of as a body part. Understand that anything I say to the contrary is metaphor."

The legs she reinforced with tendons taken from the upper neck and hands. "Mobility is important. The dead are slow, powerful legs make them faster." Its off-hand had been withered away, its flesh stripped off, internal organs ripped out. "If you don't need a part, get rid of it," Munne said, "every ounce makes a minion that much harder to sustain. An invisible umbilical cord ties you to each of your dead children. Don't make them any more hungry than they absolutely have to be, and never raise more than you can feed." Munne stopped and thought a moment. "Which is good advice in general, really. Remind me to teach you how to atrophy unwanted fetuses sometime."

It took her nearly an hour to finish sculpting the creature. "This is a standard war horror," Munne said when she had finished,"some make the mistake of crafting an entire horde out of nothing but these. Certainly there are advantages to mass production. The more you craft a single breed of minion, the faster you will be able to create them. Experienced necromancers can craft a familiar minion in twelve minutes, fast enough to assemble a respectable pack in an hour. But such a general use tool is rarely useful outside of actual war zones." Munne turned to look directly at Lilith. "Tell me, how might you make a more useful minion than this one?"

"On my first try?" Lilith asked.

"Stick to theory for now," Munne responded.

"Well..." she thought. The shape was still basically humanoid, but was that really optimal? Humans were creatures of plains and woods. What did creatures of caverns look like? Bats. Insects. Spiders. They could all get up and down very easily, but why? Trees were easily climbed and almost always had branches within the six foot reach of a human being, open plains meant that anything that couldn't fly could only move in two dimensions, but caves were covered in walls, in passages dug by time in random positions. "Some way of getting to hard to reach areas," Lilith said, "up and down vertical shafts, to openings that are far above the ground."

"Good. Continue," Munne said.

"Um..." What did the grave watchers actually _do_ down here? "Well, something that could light candles and say prayers, except..."

"Except what?" Munne said.

Except that if minions could do that, Munne wouldn't be doing it herself between apprentices. Lilith knew that making a new minion couldn't possibly take more than a few hours no matter how complex, and Munne would sink much more time than that into lighting the candles. But _why_? "Except the dead would probably be angered by having their rites performed by an unthinking minion."

"What makes you think that?" Munne asked.

"Because..." Lilith thought for a moment. Why _would_ the dead care? Why did they care in the first place?

Her thoughts were interrupted by a leather strap striking her shoulder and leaving another welt. Munne had made fairly liberal use of that. Lilith wasn't sure if it was because she was a slave or if she did it to all her apprentices. "If you can't immediately tell me how you came to a conclusion you've already reached, that means it was either a guess or you know your reasoning is shaky. Which is it?"

"Well...There has to be some reason you didn't just use a minion to honor the altars between apprentices," Lilith said.

"Indeed. As it happens the point of the ritual is to show the dead they are _remembered_, and corpses do not remember anything," Munne said, "on top of which they can't move with enough precision to reliably light candles, nor would their prayers be heard as anything more than a barely-coherent groan." Munne twirled the leather strap in her hands idly. Lilith braced herself for another blow. "If you don't know, say as much," Munne said, "I ask you questions to make you think, girl, not to have an excuse to smack you. If I just wanted to hurt you I could do that whenever I want, for any reason or none at all. Even ignoring your legal status, there's no witnesses to anything down here but me and the dead things only I can talk to."

"Y-yes, Miss Munne, but..." Lilith's courage only lasted for the first word of her objection.

"But what?" Munne asked, and Lilith knew she couldn't drop it now.

"But you _have_ hit me for not knowing things before," Lilith said.

"I chastise you for wasting my time so that you'll learn not to do so in the future," Munne said, "when you make me repeat back something I have already taught you, you waste my time. When you give me wild guesses when the truth is that you don't know and can't figure it out, you waste my time. And even if you _have_ forgotten something I taught you, you'll waste less of my time and be chastised less if you're up front about it. Understand?"

"Yes, Miss Munne," Lilith said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, do better," Munne said, "so, vertical mobility, altar work is out, what else?"

Lilith closed her eyes and concentrated again. The welt forming on her shoulder was not much more of a distraction than the usual irritating pain in her chest. What, besides honoring the dead, did the grave watchers do down here? They fought the dead when they grew restless. "Well, weapons," Lilith said, "of the same sort the standard horrors have."

"Not of the same sort," Munne said, "a catacomb minion will want a different sort. Why?"

Lilith thought for a moment. How did cave creatures fight? Bats swooped down on prey if they were carnivorous, but most of them were herbivores who ran and hid anyway. Spiders typically relied on venom or muscle power minions just wouldn't have. Insects like her plague locusts would rip things apart with their jaws..."If you reinforced the jaw to crunch the bones in half and then tear, you could probably get even a corpse to rip a living limb off, but...The war horror does that already, so, I don't know, miss."

"Gravity," Munne said, "a minion adapted for underground combat is going to get more force from falling on something than from hacking at it. A catacomb minion should have multiple legs with a powerful grip to enable it to climb around the place, the grip should be capable of holding things so it can be used as messenger, and it should be able to lose as many legs as possible without being immobilized or significantly slowed. It should be bidirectional, with no distinct top or bottom, and its weapons should point up and down so that it can fall onto a target and be able to get themselves out of the way when it needs to squeeze through a narrow space. This way you get a minion that can be used to transport and retrieve small objects as well as serve as a moderately competent combatant. All-told, far more versatile than a corpse usually manages."

Munne clapped her hands together and said "now, enough with theory, let's try it in practice. Come with me." Munne led Lilith away from the large crypt where they had been practicing, which had been selected for its abundance of fresh corpses. Winding towards the Temple Corridor, past the ruined temple itself, and on into territory that was firmly controlled by the maelstrom. "I have discovered my wayward former apprentice has been doing ritual work near here, and has apprenticed himself to Oberan. Oberan is not our enemy, or at least not yet, but nevertheless this sort of betrayal cannot be permitted. Fortunately, it tends to clean itself up, since Oberan inevitably sacrifices them as part of some dark ritual, or maybe just to appease some of the spirits he walks with."

The corridors here were a solid fifteen feet across, not nearly so grand as the Sect War or Temple Corridors, but wider by far than the twisting passages of the Labyrinth. As in almost all the catacombs, there were alcoves every few feet full of decaying bodies. "In any case, this latest apprentice left a mess. He bound a number of spirits into a creature of malice made into reality. It hates everything living and wants us all to die, and is entirely mindless and unable to be negotiated with, so there's really nothing else to do but kill it. And kill it you shall, with a minion army." This place was quiet. The dead did not seem to linger here. The altars were deserted. "Fortunately he seems to have used up all the local ghosts to make the beast, which means you will not have to worry about anything but the monster itself. Sink or swim, my apprentice."

Munne stopped, Lilith stopped with her. There was something softly burning up ahead, providing a brighter light than the green glow of Munne and Lilith's staves, which otherwise was their only light in the darkness. "What's that?" she asked.

Munne shrugged. "I haven't been here in years. It wasn't there when I was here last. This is your test. I'm just here to see if you can pass it."

Lilith scrutinized the thing. It was like a lantern, constantly producing flame, but curiously the flame was smokeless. It must be sorcerous, and was probably either some kind of residue or maybe some kind of trap. Lilith didn't know much of practical sorcery, as the teaching of that was entirely reserved for the more advanced years at the Academy. Her old friends would probably be learning some of the first of it now, actually. It was autumn, and they'd be starting their third year.

What they knew on the other side of the kingdom wouldn't help her now, though. She knelt down besides a corpse and pulled out the tiny, razor-sharp knife Munne had given her for glyphwork. She cut the glyph of reanimation into the corpse's forehead, and then a corresponding glyph of control into her own arm, and focused her energies. "Come on, come on," she whispered to herself. It seemed unfair that her first reanimation be part of a test, but then when had anything in her life been _fair_?

The corpse twitched, stirred, and finally staggered to its feet, and Lilith breathed a sigh of relief. She _could_ feel it taxing her, though, draining her energies. And yet, through the same connection, she could feel it waiting for command. She willed it towards the fire, pointing to reinforce her direction; she knew its dead eyes were blind, but she knew also that this sort of reinforcement made the resolve stronger in her own mind, and thus sent the command more clearly to the minion.

The zombie lurched towards the fire, Lilith stood back, and then there was a spectacular bang and a wave of heat and blast that sent Lilith a step backwards, the fire pluming outwards to consume what pieces of the corpse hadn't been sent flying."Well," Lilith said to herself, "now we know what that does."

She had no idea how to make the many-limbed crawling thing that Munne had told her about in practice, and she did not trust herself to create one from scratch in theory. In any case, while it lost a lot of weight off its center, it made up for that in its many limbs, which would require Lilith to hack apart multiple corpses and stitch them together to get that many limbs, and surely that would take time which Lilith didn't have. These parts of the catacombs were dangerous for the living.

Lilith was reshaping the corpse into a proper war horror, hacking away the unnecessary limbs (she did not know the glyphs to wither them, but with some effort her knife could cut through the joints entirely), peeling off flesh here and stitching it back on there, and carving in what glyphs she knew to meld its bone into the blade, to turn its ribs into a maw that replaced its missing head, and finally to bind it to her will.

The legs were shaky. The radius and ulna were fused at the end, but separate where they connected at the elbow, a dangerous weakspot that would allow a clever enemy to cripple her minion's primary weapon with ease. But it lurched about steady enough not to fall over, and a few experimental swings at the wall showed it could at least hit a target without ripping its blade off, and hit it hard enough to cut something. It would do.

Lilith had created her third minion and been at it for close to two hours before she felt herself being stretched thin. The minions sapped her energy, anymore and she might grow weary simply maintaining them all. She knew from her studies at Nolani Academy that necromancers could trivially sustain a half-dozen minions. Had she really reached her limit so quickly? Hopefully there was some trick she was missing, or it would get easier with practice. She was young, she should have energy to spare.

The creatures' method of descending the short stairways in the corridor was to fall down them, and then get back up, but they seemed no worse for the wear. Two more of the fire traps Lilith encountered on her way in, and in each case she animated a whole corpse nearby, taxing herself for only a minute while it lurched into the trap, set it off, and was blown away. Better not to sacrifice minions which took her a half-hour at best to construct.

A final flight of stairs branched off from the main corridor, leading down into the ritual room. Previously a chapel dedicated to the veterans of the ancient war with Istan, at least 500 years old and in a state of advanced decay, it was covered now with candles placed with ritual precision, which still burned bright. Standing in the center of the room was a massive, bestial creature. It looked a bit like a primate might, but hunched over so far that it still crawled about on all fours, and thick-set, like someone had crossed an ape with a bull. It had no fur or flesh, however, and instead seemed to be comprised of pure shadow.

Its ethereal head turned towards Lilith, and it climbed towards her, its body passing straight through the candles without disturbing them. Lilith's minions marched ahead of her, tumbled down the stairs, and then righted themselves, baring three sets of rib-fangs as the beast advanced. A minion stepped forward and gave an experimental swing, and the nightmare flinched backwards, but too late to avoid a minor nick on its shoulder. Shadow escaped from the wound like steam from boiling water, but the creature was deathly silent.

It reached out with a shadowy hand and grabbed a minion, dragging it towards itself and ripping through its boney structure with its spare hand, the lower ribs used to support the upper half collapsing under the powerful blow. The other two minions rushed forward to hack away at it, and Lilith opened her mouth, the plague locusts emerging from all orifices and flying towards the nightmare. If it can be _cut_, it can be _devoured_.

The bugs bit into the shadowy beast as it finished ripping the first minion apart, casually tossing it aside and yanking the arm off another before the swarm took hold, and the nightmare began to stagger about, its claws scraping the locusts off of it while the remaining two minions hacked or bit into it, depending on what body parts they had left. The nightmare had no mouth, made no noise, and yet somehow Lilith could tell it was howling with fury as it put its fist through the jaws of one of the minions. It went flying backwards, but having lost its head once already, it wasn't terribly fazed to have lost the replacement. Jaws shattered, it rose to its feet and charged the nightmare, which was busy dismembering the other minion.

The nightmare bled shadow from multiple wounds now, including hundreds of tiny bites from Lilith's swarm, but the plague locusts were beginning to drop dead, incredibly short-lived outside of Lilith's system, and the last remaining minion was quickly ripped in half. The nightmare advanced up the stairs towards Lilith, who raised her staff and thrust it straight into a large wound on the creature's neck, then twisted the staff sideways, hoping to hit something vital. The creature reared backwards in pain, tearing the staff out of Lilith's hands, and then grabbed her around the throat, its other hand coming to rest on her head. She could see its tenebrous muscles tensing in preparation to twist her head off and closed her eyes, and then the creature shuddered and went limp.

Munne's own staff glowed with green light, having cast some curse on the creature to finish it. Lilith backed away, coughing and sucking in deep breaths of air as the nightmare dissolved back into its component spirits. "Go, now," Munne said, "return to your altars. Be free once more, and remember who it was that bound you, and who it was that set you free." She knelt down, grabbed Lilith, and yanked her to her feet. "Come on, not all of the dead will be grateful for what we have done for them. We don't want to be here when they recover their senses."

Lilith followed behind Munne as she strode away from the scene. Apparently the danger wasn't urgent enough to warrant an all-out sprint. "W-why?" Lilith asked, "why save me? I thought-"

"That you had failed the test?" Munne said, "it's a nightmare, girl, a novice doesn't fight nightmares and win even with the advantage of surprise. You used what you had with an...Acceptable level of proficiency. I've taught smarter than you. I've taught stupider, too. You'll do." Lilith smiled, an expression which vanished when she heard the furious wailing of the ghosts behind her, and instead she put her energy into moving faster. "You'll need some decent armor before we go any further," Munne said, "from here on in the kid gloves are off. You'll be doing _dangerous_ work."


	10. Trouble in the Woods

The armor felt good. Hardened leather plates strapped across her chest, arms, legs, a skull-like mask covering her face connected to a helmet that protected her head. It was lightweight, flexible, and honestly it probably wouldn't even stop a well-placed hack of a sword. So it's only functional purpose was to stop the nicks and scrapes and minor cuts, to put an inch of _something_ between her and a sword, a poison stinger, a burning torch.

But it felt good. For the first time in a year, Lilith felt protected. The armor was a carapace that blocked out the outside world. The helmet muffled her hearing, and the mask muffled her voice. The gloves put a comforting distance between her and everything she touched, and the rest of it put the same distance between everything that touched her. It was no accident that slaves ended up half-dressed most of the time, Lilith knew. It was an intentional act of psychological warfare, to make them feel vulnerable, exposed. But Lilith wasn't like that. Not anymore.

Not that she was exactly free, either. The pendant digging into her chest was a constant reminder of that. But the pain didn't bother her so much now, even though it had, if anything, grown more intense since she strapped the armor over it. She could deal with it. As maddening as it was to have this constant grinding pain in her chest, she could deal with it.

Of course, what she was supposed to be doing now was meditating. One of the side chambers in the Catacombs near the Temple Corridor had become her personal haunt, a place of seclusion to whence she retreated to study and practice alone. Munne trusted her enough not to waste time in here, but sometimes rather than focus her energies with proper meditation Lilith would take some time to just think. She did well enough on whatever tests Munne had set out for her that she didn't feel the need to dedicate _all_ of her efforts to training and study.

"I was told I might find you here," a familiar voice said, and Lilith glanced over her shoulder to see Paulus the Monk standing there.

"Why are you here?" Lilith asked, suddenly fearful that Munne had taken her without the monk's approval, and he'd come here to reclaim her for petty chores in the Abbey.

"For support on the surface," Paulus said, "you're a witch, or close enough to one, support on the surface is running slim, and the charr are still rampaging up north, so our problems with manpower are only getting worse. It might not be long before I'm sent north as well, and I want to leave Devona and the Ashford Guard with as little to deal as I can."

"And...I'm going to help you with this," Lilith said, getting to her feet.

"You are," Paulus said, "Devona can't keep Ashford in one piece on her own. The grawl are still a problem, the bandits are growing bolder, if she turns her attentions to one, she loses the ability to defend the village from the other. I hope I don't have to explain why a village being sacked in the shadow of Ascalon City would be a bad thing."

"Will I never have to stop reminding people that I was a noble?" Lilith asked.

Paulus shrugged and headed for the exit. "Come with me. We're heading to the surface."

"I can't just leave without Munne's permission," Lilith said, unmoving.

"I talked to Munne already. How do you think I knew where to find you?" Paulus asked, stopping at the door.

"Maybe you just looked for the door guarded by war horrors," Lilith said, but followed Paulus nonetheless.

"In this catacomb? It would've taken me hours," Paulus said, as they emerged into the Temple Corridor. Lilith's trio of war horrors began marching along behind them.

Lilith was not a stranger to direct sunlight. Beams of it fell through the outskirts of the catacombs, where she lived and spent a good deal of her time. It still felt strange walking into the open. If nothing else, there was not the usual chill of stepping out into the autumn air wearing thin, ragged clothing, and not much of that. Quietly she prayed that her place in the catacombs at least last through winter, when every slave's errand was a race against frostbite.

"So what's the plan?" Lilith asked as they emerged into Abbey's courtyard.

"We head to the hills. We find the bandits. We kill the bandits," Paulus said.

"Seriously?" Lilith asked, "you worked out who I was by interrogating farmers that night like four weeks ago when I got the stinger for you, but your entire battle plan for attacking the bandits is just...Attack?"

"I am a smiter, and you a witch, and you have your horrors," Paulus said, "I think you overestimate their chances."

"I think you overestimate caster supremacy," Lilith said, "I'm an apprentice. I have three horrors and a few witch tricks. You're better at fighting the dead than the living. We're outnumbered twenty to one, unless the bandits have been on a recruiting drive the past month."

"You don't understand bandits," Paulus said, "they're in it for the money. Because they can't make a livelihood of their own, or because they just don't want to. Either way, when their leaders fall, they'll scatter. If they take heavy losses, they'll scatter. Yes, they can kill us if they sacrifice half their number, but from their perspective, we'll be back later. Why flip a coin for temporary safety when running away is much more likely to get you out alive?"

"If they all run away," Lilith said, "how does that solve the problem?"

"They're no longer organized," Paulus said, "regrouping will take them time, they will be less bold and stay further on the outskirts, they will lose a few of their number to deserters who are too scared to regroup or become lost, and they will lose more to infighting as new leaders establish themselves. The plan, so far as you are concerned, is that we find them, and then we kill them."

Lilith sighed and said "you'd better be right about this."

"You act like it's not my life on the line, too," Paulus said.

The rest of the trip was occupied by nothing but idle chatter. The hills on the outskirts of Ashford still thrived with bandits. The camp contained dozens, in plain sight of nearby farmers. Lilith looked to where Pitney's farm was, or rather, had been. The homestead was blackened by fire, and from the state of the weeds growing amongst the crops, had been for at least a week. "So I take it finding them was the easy part?" Lilith asked.

"Indeed," Paulus said, "get ready."

Lilith pulled her minions in a bit tighter, forming a shield just a few feet in front of Paulus and herself. She drew in a deep breath and tried to feel out the living, sense their heartbeats, but this was a trick she had not yet got the hang of. She could feel her own thudding in her chest. She could reliably pinpoint Munne's when she focused, but only because Munne's was alone in a sea of empty stone and dusty corpses.

There were heartbeats everywhere now. Anytime she scrutinized one, it always felt wrong. Too fast. Too slow. Bird? Rabbit? Maybe herself and Munne just had unusually fast heartbeats? _That_ one had to be a mouse, though, it was like a constant purr. She couldn't even hear when one beat stopped and another started. Plus, the catacomb had rats. Lilith sometimes spent days at a time living off their blood. Munne was right when she said that it helped hone her ability to track the living, and that the blood of a scant dozen a day would be enough to keep her healthy, but gods did they taste awful.

"Wait," Lilith said, placing a hand on Paulus' arm to stop him, "something up ahead." She concentrated. The _thump-thump_ that she did not so much hear as _feel_ was steady, at about the same pace as hers and Munne's and Paulus'. It _could _be a similarly sized creature, except that it was coming from the trees. "Human heartbeats," she whispered, "in the trees up above. It's an ambush."

Paulus squinted up at the trees ahead, and then said in a very loud voice "I don't see anything. You're just getting jumpy because it's your first time." He followed with a whisper "if you have anything that works at range, use it as soon as you're close enough."

Lilith had put embarrassingly little thought into how she would actually _fight_ the bandits. Every single one of her orifices was sealed up tight enough that her swarm would be unable to crawl out. She could spoil blood at distance, but that would do little else than make the bandits uneasy, perhaps make them vomit if she was lucky. It wouldn't kill anyone. And her minions couldn't climb trees. And she couldn't even suck blood through her mask. So _this_ is why so many witches only wore the masks at ceremonies and went barefoot.

Lilith still had her staff and her knife, though. She aimed it at the nearest heartbeat and fired, a pulse of deathly energy sapping the life from him, and then, clenching her fist with effort, focused on his heartbeat, on the blood that ran through it, on making it run _black_. With a strangled noise he fell from the tree, and her minions charged him. The young man, not much older than Lilith, struggled to his feet, arrows sang out from the trees and thudded uselessly into the walking husks, and they carved the man into pieces.

With catlike agility, Paulus leapt straight from the ground and into a tree, catching an arrow with his shield and hacking into the bandit with his blade. Lilith ducked for cover behind a tree, sending bolts of dark energy out from hiding whenever she dared, while Palus moved from one tree to the next, sometimes hacking at the bandits' throats or heads for a quick kill, other times just kicking them out of the tree and onto the ground where Lilith's minions would slaughter them.

Within ten seconds, the direction of the battle was clear. The remaining bandits jumped down from the trees and began running back towards their camp, and Paulus tore after them. Lilith sent her minions charging behind him, but followed at a more cautious distance himself. Let Paulus play the hero if he wanted, Lilith owed nothing to the kingdom of Ascalon, and if Paulus died with no one to inherit her, there wouldn't be anyone coming down into the catacombs to drag her away from her training to risk her life with some surface bandits.

But then, there was that burnt-out homestead. And the last time she had made these sorts of justifications to herself...Well, she still had nightmares about the head of Fadden Hathorn, piked on the walls of Ascalon.

Lilith pulled off her helmet and gloves and followed after Paulus and her minions. As they drew near the camp, she summoned up the swarm from within herself and sent it to devour the bandits, who now roused themselves for battle. As the swarm descended upon them and began devouring three or four, the minions charged in heedless of the limbs hacked off or the flesh burnt away, and Paulus right behind them, sword glowing with fire, the bandits' morale broke and they fled. Lilith found one running in the direction of Pitney's old farm and picked him off with her staff. She left her locusts out to chase the rest until they died a minute or two later, claiming another handful of victims.

Paulus had chased one of the bandits down and cut his legs out from under him before slitting his throat, and now was making his way back up the hill to the camp. Lilith stood amidst the tents, her minions staggering back towards her. Fortunately all of the bandits had spent their time trying to attack the meaty upper half, which resulted in lots of deep cuts, terrible burns, broken bones, and other wounds that damaged an undead minion's capabilities not at all. Their legs and weapon arms were, for the most part, untouched. Lilith herself had come out of the battle unscathed. Having a wall of friendly minions certainly made a difference.

"As I said," Paulus said as he reached the top of the hill, "cut a few down and the rest scatter."

"More like a dozen," Lilith said, looking about the battlefield. One bandit still writhed in pain on the ground, staring at the intestines sprawled out on the dirt. Lilith wasn't sure if it was one of her minions or Paulus who had opened him up. Either way, she knelt down besides him with her knife, his eyes widened with fear as he saw her, and he started to stammer something out when Lilith cut his throat. Blood gurgled up as he sank back into the ground, his eyes glazing over. Lilith sighed and stood. "So that's that?" she asked.

"For the easy part, yes," Paulus said, "the grawl have greater forces, and they're more savage and less likely to run than these lot anyway."

"Yeah," Lilith said, "you can tell these guys didn't have it coming because of how easy it was to give it to them."

"What?" Paulus asked.

"How many of them ended up where they are because Adelbern fucked everything up?" Lilith asked, "every time he wants to invest in some foreign market or fund a new great wonder of Ascalon, the taxes get raised on his own people. Soon, they can't afford to eat, they get desperate, they become outlaws, and then...We kill them."

"They were extorting farmers," Paulus said, "they were forcing others to give up the honest fruits of their own labor in exchange for nothing."

"Because the fruits of their own labor had already been stolen," Lilith said, "they were forced to choose between themselves and others, and they chose themselves. Is that really so bad?"

"Maybe not," Paulus said, "but someone had to pay the price for what was set in motion. Perhaps it should have been Adelbern, but it is far beyond the abilities of you and me to make him pay for this."

"Do you think it should've been Adelbern?" Lilith asked.

"Why?" Paulus asked.

"Do you think Rurik would've done better?" Lilith asked.

"Regardless of who should be sitting on the throne of Ascalon," Paulus said, "the kingdom will be better off with the grawl driven off. If I answer with an opinion opposite yours, it will drive a needless wedge between us."

"Yeah," Lilith said, "I guess you're right. Except..."

"Except _what_?" Paulus asked, his agitation showing.

Lilith was going to say that she didn't know which side she was on. Didn't know if she liked _either_ side. Rurik himself thought the blood of Thorn ran thin in him, but who else was there? The bloodlines of Kryta ran as thin as those of Ascalon, if it had any survivors at all, and the bloodline of Orr had long since been erased. Maybe it would be better to just do away with the entire royal family and put the most worthy noble yet living on the throne. But who would that even be? Didn't the thinning of the blood apply as much to every noble family as it did to the royal? "Lilith," Paulus said, stirring her form her internal monologue, "we need to keep moving. Come on!"

"Right. Sorry," Lilith said, heading back into the wooded hills, "we'll need to take the same route back down, my helmet and gloves are back there," she explained.

The population of Ashford Village was thinner than it had been before, and those that were there kept to themselves. This time last month, Lilith could hardly walk twenty feet without running into someone trying to pressgang her into doing some chore or another for her. Now she and Paulus could walk from one end of the village to the other without seeing a single person on the streets, though Lilith saw a few through windows or working in their shops.

Devona's guardhouse was still manned, though down to a skeleton crew. Lilith turned her face aside, not eager to be recognized, before she realized that she was wearing a mask. Paulus greeted Devona. "You're finally here," Devona said, "the last recruiting drive for more men to send north has emptied us almost completely, and I've heard talk they won't be coming back once that damned warband is hunting down. Word is, Adelbern is building an army to counterattack. If that's true, this grawl problem is solved today or it isn't solved at all."

"Then it's a good thing we're here," Paulus said, "you said the grawl were hiding out across the bridge?"

"Yes," Devona said, "give me a half-hour to marshal my men and I'll lead the force. You and the witch can hold the flanks, my men will make up the main body."

"You catch that?" Paulus asked.

"Yes," Lilith said, "left flank or right?"

"Right flank will be near the river," Paulus said, "the grawl will avoid it, but there's a chance of being attacked by skale."

"So I'm taking the right flank, then?" Lilith asked.

"If you want it," Paulus said, "the left flank, all you'll have to worry about is grawl. So which scares you more, dumb animals that don't know the terrain, or dumber ones that do?"

"I don't care," Lilith said, "pick one."

Paulus shrugged. "Alright, I'll take the left flank, you can have the right."

Devona's total force was hardly two-dozen men. Each one had proper chain armor and was fully outfitted with the best weapons available. Still, it seemed like a paltry army. Lilith knew that the armies north of the wall were always at least hundreds strong, and often enough thousands. "Is this it?" Lilith asked.

"We're stretched thin," Devona said, "but there is no need to fear. The soldiers of Thorn have triumphed over ten times their number, and Ascalon is the last kingdom ruled by the blood of Thorn. We are ready for them, this time. We will drive them from Lakeside, and by nightfall we shall have peace and plunder!"

The guardsmen gave a cheer, and Lilith decided to refrain from asking any more potentially demoralizing questions. Historically speaking, if you couldn't inspire courage, chopping off pieces of the people who questioned you was considered a good way to inspire fear, which was the next best thing.

Though each of soldier in it crept along as quietly as they could, the entire army was so obvious that they may as well have had bannermen and drummers leading the march. The sun was drifting off towards afternoon when Devona shouted "grawl!" The army found trees and ditches and rocks to hide behind. Lilith could see them, too, and sought out their heartbeats. It was always convenient, when fighting an enemy of a different breed, because you could feel the difference in their hearts. Your side would beat along one rhythm, theirs on another. Lilith had been taught, and she believed, that the grawl's hearts beat slightly faster than a human's...But damned if she could keep track. They all seemed human to her.

But behind them, there was a heart that beat slow and powerful, a mighty bass to her tiny snare drum. "There's something out there," she said to a nearby soldier, "something _big_."

An arrow thudded into a tree, a harbinger of dozens more. The grawl across the woods snarled and charged, and the archers of Ashford returned fire. Lilith sent her minions out to meet the grawl charge while the guardsmen stayed back to hold the line; her skirmishers fared poorly, cutting up a few grawl but claiming not even a single casualties before the grawl's heavy hammers smashed them to pieces.

Devona met the first grawl of the enemy line with a swing of her hammer that smashed its skull into paste. The guardsmen behind her rushed into the fray, the lines devolving into the confused chaos of battle. An arrow struck Lilith in the arm, and she hissed with pain, snapping the head off and tearing the shaft out. Another arrow, a massive three and a half foot shaft, burrowed through a soldier's chest and pinned him to the tree behind.

A few grawl peeled off towards her flank, caution keeping them from the river, where even now the skale began to gather. Lilith weakened a grawl with a bolt from her staff, shattered its kneecap with a well-placed blow from the bottom end of it, and then shoved him down the riverbank, sending him tumbling down to where the hungry skale waited, pouncing upon the unlucky grawl in an instant, tearing the still-living creature to pieces with their jaws.

Her arm seared with pain, the wound from the grawl arrow taking its toll. The soldiers near Lilith had rushed to meet the enemy. One of the grawl, distracted by a guardsmen, Lilith tackled to the ground. Tearing off her helmet, she bit into its neck. Its blood tasted foul, but not so terrible as the rats she'd grown used to. The wound on her arm sealed up as she sucked the grawl dry.

Rising from her prey, Lilith snatched up her staff and confronted a pair of hammer-wielding grawl who had just finished smashing in the legs of a guardsman, who tried for a moment to crawl away from the distracted grawl, but then gave up with a moan of agony as his ruined legs were dragged across the forest floor. Lilith spoiled the blood of one grawl, and it doubled over with pain, and then shot a pulse from her staff to the other, but despite the enervation it stepped forward and swung hard. Lilith ducked and turned and the hammer smashed into her shoulder instead of her stomach, making a sickening cracking noise and sending her sprawling to the ground. She fought down a wave of nausea and struggled to keep her staff held in her good hand.

She focused on the grawl's heartbeat as she rose to her feet, hoping to spoil his blood as well, but it attacked again, swinging towards her head, the hammer whistling above as she ducked under. The other grawl staggered up to confront her as well, sickened but not defeated. One took a high swing towards Lilith, and she shrank back out of range while the other pounced on her from the opposite side, swinging its hammer down to shatter her kneecap. She screamed with pain and collapsed to the ground. The two grawl loped towards her, snarling, but an arrow caught the sickened one in the chest, and it staggered backwards. The other looked to his companion, looked to the archer, and flinched as another arrow sailed through the air, this one passing harmlessly to the side. The grawl bellowed with fury. Lilith screamed with pain, rising to her feet. She shoved the bottom of her staff into the grawl's open mouth and channeled raw death into it until it grew limp, and then her hands went slack as well and she dropped to her knees.

Lilith crawled towards the grawl shot by the arrow and sank her teeth into it. Even after the corpse was dry her knee and shoulder moved only with agonizing pain. Lilith clenched her teeth and pulled herself to her feet again, examining the field around her. The grawl were drawing back. Devona and a small force of her guardsmen were among the archers, who drew shortswords and hatchets or else used their bows as clubs in a vain attempt to defend themselves. They were fleeing. In the distance, she could see the bestial form of a charr holding an eight-foot longbow. Its eyes were calculating, a beast that could think like a human. It surveyed the battlefield, saw its scrawny allies falling back, and snarled, retreating with them.

Lilith found a dying guardsman and knelt down beside him, wincing with pain. The guardsman stared down at the gaping hole in his chest, his lungs too damaged to speak. "Shhhh," Lilith said, putting a finger to his lips, which silently mouthed out what looked like gibberish. "I'll put you to sleep," Lilith said, and bit into his neck.

By the time she'd finished feeding from the dead, Lilith was whole again. There would likely be some scars left from the arrow that had pierced her, and she was still having some difficulty walking. Had the bones healed not quite right? Or was she just sore from the fight? She hoped it was the latter. Otherwise she would have to deal with the limp until she could convince Munne to get her the attentions of a proper healer. At least it wasn't _much_ of a limp.

Devona was returning to the main group. It looked like about two-thirds of the guardsmen had survived the fight. By the look of the corpses, the grawl had suffered a similar fraction of casualties, which was impressive given there were three times as many of them. Lilith slipped her mask back on and went to meet with Devona and Paulus. "Get the wounded and help them back to the Abbey for immediate healing," Devona ordered her men, who immediately set about gathering up the injured. "If we had a damn healer," Devona muttered to herself without finishing.

Paulus was already helping a man with a mauled foot to his feet, supporting his weight and limping back towards the bridge that led to Ashford Abbey. It was _miles_ from here. It had taken an hour to get here in good condition. In bad, it would be two, perhaps three? Lilith knew that for healing there was a "golden hour" inside which almost any wound could be sealed, but past that, grievous wounds were sometimes beyond the aid of even magical healing. And with a dozen wounded and only one healer to go around, they might not all receive magical healing. She was glad she could heal herself. Waiting in line at the Abbey would be torturous.

"So are we done?" Lilith asked, walking alongside Paulus, "is this it, are we finished?"

"The work is never finished, Lilith," Paulus said, "there will always be a thief, a runaway slave, a cheat, _someone_ who must be brought to justice."

"This doesn't strike me as bringing people to justice so much as fighting a localized war," Lilith said.

"With so few guardsmen, that's about the size of it," Paulus said, "we have so few men, and have had such bad luck, that the criminals of the county can mass their forces and rampage through the outskirts without our being able to stop them. But at least now they'll be kept to the outskirts."

"Not just bad luck," Lilith said, "those grawl were being led by a charr. Didn't you see it?"

"A charr?" Paulus asked, "south of the wall?"

"Ayup," Lilith said, "Devona suspected someone was behind the attacks when she brought in the wounded from the ambush a few weeks ago. I was still there recovering from the...Well, you know. You're the one who brought me."

"Aye," Paulus said, "I remember."

"At the time I thought she suspected Royalists," Lilith said.

"No," Paulus said with a smile. Lilith looked to him quizzically. He couldn't see the quizzical expression on her face, of course, but he noticed her head turning towards him.

"Devona...Never suspects Royalists because there's not many around here," Paulus said carefully.

"Ah," Lilith said with a hidden smile, "so _that's_ who you favor for the throne." Paulus looked towards the guardsman with the mauled foot, on the other side of him. "I wouldn't tell anyone if you just tossed him in the river," Lilith offered.

"What?!" the guardsman yelped.

"He's a guardsman!" Paulus said, "I can't betray him!" The guardsman breathed a sigh of relief.

"I dunno, he heard some inconvenient things," Lilith said.

"He heard fodder for rumors. There's enough of those already," Paulus said, "and if he or anyone else goes missing in the night, I'll know who to suspect."

"Not I," Lilith said, "all I said is I wouldn't tell anyone if you wanted to get rid of him. I wouldn't touch him myself." She clutched at the brand behind her ear, hidden though it was beneath her helmet. "I'm not a noble," she said, "I've gotten pretty used to doing what other people tell me."

"Then do as you're told and leave the guard alone," Paulus said.

"Yes, sir," Lilith said half-heartedly.

The next few minutes they walked in silence. "I never thanked you," Lilith said, "for bringing me to the infirmary the one time. I owed this to you, and I've been a brat about it the whole time. I'm sorry."

"You don't need to thank me," Paulus said, "you are a subject of the kingdom of Ascalon and the Lakeside County. It is my sworn duty to defend your life when I can."

"No I'm not," Lilith said, "a subject of Ascalon, I mean. Not really."

"I swore my oath to Thorn and the Lunatic Court," Paulus said, "not to any bloodline."

"Thanks for taking the oath, then," Lilith said. They were silent for a while longer. "Just so we're clear," Lilith said to the wounded guardsman, "you are not to repeat a word of this conversation to _anyone_."


	11. Grawl Invasion

Lilith was glad she had left the catacombs on Paulus' mission, but she was equally glad to return. Here, with nothing but Munne and solitude, she felt like she could _think_. And it was less frightening. There were no laws down here, which meant there were no slaves at all, including her. There was just her and Munne, and while Munne was happy to assert her effective ownership over Lilith by sucking three meals a day out of her wrist, Munne gave her something in return: Power. And also the armor, which now had a few holes and was a bit mangled, but it wasn't new when she got it anyway.

"I hope you enjoyed your little field trip," Munne said as Lilith entered the chapel.

"I did, Miss Munne," Lilith said, her chipper attitude sobering quickly, "although for the record it was not my idea and I didn't leave until I was informed you had given permission."

"If you're worried that Paulus lied, he didn't," Munne said, "though it does shed a rather irritating light on your status."

"You mean, you let him take me because up there, he owns me," Lilith said.

"Exactly," Munne said, then thought for a moment and said "no, not quite. I let him take you up there because _down here_ he owns you."

"You said the law doesn't really exist down here," Lilith said.

"I _am_ the law down here," Munne said, "I made an agreement with Paulus that I would train you to be my assistant and, should you survive, replacement, and he agreed only under the condition that he would be able to enlist you in whatever he needed a witch's aid for, without incurring any debt to the catacombs. I didn't expect him to need aid so _soon_."

"And you...Said yes?" Lilith asked.

"Of course," Munne said, "he'd hardly have agreed if I refused his terms."

"No, I mean...What's in it for you?" Lilith asked, "giving up so much leverage over the Abbey...How can I possibly be worth it? We both know I've cost you more time than I've saved."

Munne scoffed. "It's an investment. I only give up my leverage over the Abbey while you're still alive. The longer you stay alive, the less time you'll spend in training and the more time you'll spend bringing the catacombs back under our control. Thus, the more the trade costs me, the more it's worth."

"I understand," Lilith said, "but what happens when you die and I take over? Paulus can really just demand the only grave watcher in Lakeside County abandon her post whenever he wants?"

"I don't expect Paulus will outlive me," Munne said, "or certainly not by much. In any case, if you do succeed me, then _you_ are the law down here. You can choose to continue honoring my agreement with Paulus, or you can decide it doesn't apply. Either way, if it's less than half a century from now I'll be disappointed, so there's little point in worrying about it. Do you have any more questions about the distant future?"

"Um, no, Miss Munne," Lilith said, "I'm sorry if I wasted any of your time."

"Oh, please," Munne said, "you know if you did I'd have let you know. Get going. There's still time to honor the spirits of the Temple Corridor, so hurry up."

The ghosts in the Temple Corridor were only slightly perturbed at having had to wait another six hours for their rites. Lilith could see them clearly now, as individual spirits. She could see how they appeared in life, how they appeared at the moment of their death, and their rotted husks.

There were children buried down here. Had she stopped to think about it, she would have realized that of course children died sometimes, and of course they would be buried with their families, but it had still taken some getting used to, being confronted with the ugly truth every day: Children die. And in death they remain children. They never grew. They never learned. They were helpless and frightened and cold. Forever. And out there in the great maelstrom at the Pit, in the sections of the Labyrinth they did not control, in the Red Corridor where she had fought the nightmare, there were more children, and their terrified anger was all the maelstrom wanted from them.

And friendly ghosts brought her news of what happened in distant parts of the catacombs. On the other side of the Labyrinth were the Old Shrines and the Crusaders' Mausoleum, which lay beneath the Green Hills County and were overseen by Kasha Blackblood. A cult of Grenth worshipers had converted the Mausoleum into their base of operations, and Kasha was too bogged down by a gargoyle infestation in the Shrines to root them out of their hiding places.

On the other end of the Black Corridor lay the Shiverpeak Graveyard beneath Wizard's Folly, where tens of thousands of veterans and explorers who had perished in the frigid mountains to the west were buried. That place was the purview of her former mentor Verata. She still meant to return to him sometime and thank him for teaching her. And ask him why he had chosen to do so. Lilith had often begged Munne to shift their focus to following up on the death of the nightmare and claiming the Black Corridor, but Munne was satisfied with establishing a foothold there as they had in the Labyrinth. Munne told her that Kasha Blackblood was a more experienced grave watcher, and more dedicated, and regardless it was certainly her and not Verata who needed the help. Munne suspected that the Maelstrom shared her opinion of who contributed most to Ascalon's control of the catacombs. The loss of Kasha could result in the loss of the entire catacombs within a few short years if she were not replaced.

It was at the end of a lesson on using remains of the deceased to find who or what had killed them when Munne announced that Lilith was heading to Green Hills County with Paulus. "What does he need done in Green Hills County?" Lilith asked.

"Something about the charr," Munne said, "I didn't ask for details. What's important is, this is an opportunity."

"For what?" Lilith asked.

"To give Kasha some much needed aid," Munne said, "getting through the Labyrinth would be a lot of unnecessary danger anyway. I had decided to send you there myself and decided to inform Paulus that he would not be able to find you down here for several days. He said he could use your help as well."

"So which comes first, what he needs from me, or what Kasha needs from me?" Lilith asked.

"Nothing comes first, girl," Munne said, "you do both of them."

"What if I have to choose?" Lilith asked, "what if there's not enough time?"

"Listen, girl," Munne said, her voice raised slightly, "Kasha needs some help, and you will have to do. You _can't_ fail her. I made an agreement with Paulus concerning you, and I must honor it. You can't fail _him_ either. You _will_ do whatever it is the both of them ask of you, and do it to their satisfaction. Being a grave watcher is not easy."

Lilith sighed. It's not as though figuring out ways to complete impossible tasks wasn't practically her specialty at this point, and in any case nothing said their requests would necessarily be contradictory. "Yes, Miss Munne," she said.

Which is why she and Paulus were plodding along towards Green Hills County with Lilith's minions jogging behind. Lilith wasn't sure whether she was grateful for having horses to carry them there. Certainly they'd make better time, and for all that sitting in a saddle was deceptively tiring, it still wasn't so bad as actually walking. On the other hand, every bump and jostle sent new and exciting jolts of pain through her chest as the armor sat uneasy on the pedant. Every now and again a particularly bad bump would see her hissing with pain. "Are you alright?" Paulus asked finally, when she clutched at her chest from the pain.

"It's nothing," Lilith said, her voice strained, "I just really hate riding horses."

"Horse riding doesn't typically put a whole lot of strain on where the chest meets the neck," Paulus said, "what's wrong? The curse?"

Lilith sighed with exasperation. "Yes, the curse," she said, "I can deal with it, relax."

Paulus shook his head and said "alright. Just asking."

Lilith screwed her eyes shut with frustration, with the pendant and with herself. "Look, just don't talk to me 'till we get off these damn things, alright?"

The border between the two counties was marked by a massive statue to the Mad King Thorn. The two of them dismounted to make camp. The next day they'd press on to Barradin's Estate. Lilith hoped Althea wasn't in. Her mask left little chance she'd be recognized, but the pendant churning beneath her armor left her in no mood to see the duchess. "The grawl have retreated to here," Paulus said, "they're now blocking the road between Lakeside County and Green Hills County, preventing trade between Ashford and Barradin's Estate."

"They retreated _here_?" Lilith asked, "they were on the east side of Ashford, Green Hills County is _west_. Like, directly west. I'd have thought they'd retreat into Regent Valley."

"Undoubtedly the grawl would have, fleeing directly away from the army that routed them," Paulus said, "that they've instead headed up here suggests the charr is still in command of them. _And_ that this was his plan all along."

"How so?" Lilith asked.

"The grawl pushed through to Lakeside County from Pockmark Flats, which is at the eastern frontier. It wouldn't take much convincing to get the grawl to slip past our frontlines to hit territory that is both wealthier _and_ less prepared," Paulus said,"what makes less sense is heading to Green Hills County. It's far from the grawl's home territory. It's dealing with its own underpopulation problems, but not nearly so bad as Lakeside. It's not as wealthy as Lakeside, having no major cities like Ascalon to bring in trade."

"But it's a trade route between Rin and Ascalon City," Lilith said, "in fact, since Surmia has to send their goods south through the Frontier Gate now that Piken Square is occupied by the charr..." Suddenly the implications of what she was saying caught up with her. "It's the biggest trade route left in the entire kingdom and the only route from east to west that's still safe. Bad move for the grawl, but it allows the charr to cut the kingdom in half for however long the grawl hold out."

"And we need to make sure the grawl do not hold out for very long at all," Paulus said.

"Okay," Lilith said, "why us? I mean, you said yourself, the Duke keeps his estate well-armed. Can't he clean up the grawl on his own? What does this have to do with the safety of Ashford?"

Paulus hesitated only a moment before answering. "A friend made a request and Lakeside has been quiet since the grawl fled," Paulus said, his voice raising, "Devona has her hands full playing Pop Goes The Weasel with the bandit remnants. You said yourself it'll cripple the kingdom's communications. That's bad for everyone, Lakeside County included. Is that good enough for you?"

"Okay, okay," Lilith said, raising her hands, "I was just asking."

Paulus sighed with frustration. "Sorry. Worn out from the ride," he said.

Lilith shrugged. "I wasn't exactly great company on the way here." She looked to the two horses tethered to a post provided near the statue of Thorn. "And I'm _not_ looking forward to getting back on those things come morning. I'm going to sleep." Lilith grabbed her bedroll and blanket from off the horse and began setting up. "You're taking first watch, right?"

"Yes," Paulus said. Lilith was throwing the blanket over herself, now, and hadn't bothered removing her armor. "You're keeping the armor? Even the mask?" Paulus asked, "do you _ever_ take that thing off?"

"Yeah," Lilith said, "in the catacombs sometimes. Plus when I have to eat. When I need to summon a swarm."

"So, almost never. Doesn't that get uncomfortable?" Paulus asked.

"Compared to the curse? It's pretty manageable," Lilith said, "never know when I'll need armor between myself and an arrow. Now lemme alone, it takes me forever to get to sleep."

Lilith stood with head bowed around the training yard, hands clasped, while Edwin de Roblis hacked at a training dummy with a wooden sword. Her skin was covered in goosebumps from the autumn chill. Toby stood beside her. Edwin had ceased his attack on the dummy now, and marched over to the two of them, handing the sword to Toby, who immediately ran to replace it on the rack. "I always knew you'd come back," Edwin said, "you can't function anywhere else."

"No," Lilith said, "I'm supposed to be in the catacombs."

"Then why did you come back?" Edwin asked.

Lilith sobbed. "I made a mistake," she said, "I'm a witch!"

"You're a slave," Edwin said, "that's why you came back."

"No, please, you have to let me go!" But she knew they wouldn't. They never did. They didn't care about her long history of honor, about her magical aptitude, about the obvious purity of her blood. All they cared about was that they had her, and they would never let her go.

Lilith's eyes shot open, her breath short. The woods stood silent around her, the massive statue of Thorn looming in the distance. "Just a dream," Lilith whispered to herself, curling her knees up towards herself, "just a stupid dream, I'm a witch and I can have Edwin fucking _devoured_ whenever I want." She was exhausted, but sleep was suddenly terrifying, so instead pulled herself out from beneath her blanket.

"You're awake?" Paulus asked.

"Can't sleep," Lilith said, "you go to bed, I'll take the watch."

"You sure?" Paulus said, "a sleepy watch is a bad idea, especially this close to the grawl."

"I'm up and watching one way or the other," Lilith says, "trust me, I won't be sleeping for a while. One of us should be."

Paulus scrutinized her mask for a moment. Lilith wasn't sure what he was looking for. Its not like the skull's eye sockets helpfully contorted themselves into droopy eyebrows whenever she was tired. "Alright," Paulus said, "but wake me if you feel yourself getting sleepy."

By the time Paulus woke to take his watch, Lilith was exhausted. If she had dreams, she did not recall them. By afternoon the next day, they had entered the stretch of the road where the grawl were reported to be moving about in force. They moved slowly, now, Lilith having her minions march in front, which didn't really shield them so much as just their horses, but it was what she had to work with. Lilith herself was focusing on detecting the heartbeats of the creatures nearby. Rabbits and field mice she could feel out now, for how incredibly quick their hearts beat. Deer and wolves, less so. Though reassured that the beat of their hearts was quite distinct from that of humans or grawl, Lilith couldn't tell the difference. And as for the difference between humans and grawl, well, Munne had helpfully informed Lilith when she had asked that it was quite difficult to tell the difference unless you had a lot of experience with the both of them.

But she could feel _something_ distinct, and once again it was their position more than their rhythm that gave them away. "Heartbeats," Lilith said to Paulus, "in the trees."

"Grawl?" Paulus asked.

"Or human," Lilith said, having ruled out deer or wolves.

"Could be allies waiting to ambush the grawl," Paulus said, "send a minion ahead to check."

A single minion ran ahead of the others, stood in the midst of the ambushers, and then Lilith had it head to one of the trees and crane its eyeless maw upwards as though trying to get a better look at whoever the owner of the beating heart in the branches was. An arrow slammed into the minion, punching straight through its chest and through to the ground below, the force of the attack sending the minion staggering backwards.

"Black fletching," Paulus said, readying his sword and shield, "Ascalon uses red. Hit them with whatever you have!"

Lilith dismounted and brought her horse around, using it as a shield while sending her minions ahead. Her heart raced with the familiar fear of battle. She could feel it, threatening to drown out her targets. She could almost _hear_ it. The last thing she wanted was to rip her helmet off, but with a moment to double-check that her head was well and truly concealed behind her horse, she did, and opened her mouth to let the swarm free, crawling out of her every orifice. As she always did, Lilith could feel those locusts that tried to crawl out from beneath her fingernails, groin, or teats writhing about beneath her armor, looking for some way to wriggle free. She'd have to give the armor a thorough scrub when she got back to the chapel.

The swarm crawled form her mouth, her ears, her tear ducts, her nostrils, and flew into an angry, devouring black cloud towards the grawl. Arrows thudded into Paulus' shield. He leapt into the trees, swung a sword at the grawl, sent it tumbling to the ground. Lilith's minions descended upon it, hacking away at the creature as it tried to pull out a dagger to fend them off. More grawl began to fall, losing their balance as they desperately tried to scrape off Lilith's swarm from their hides. One hung by its legs from a branch, swatting at the plague locusts, until Paulus hacked into its leg. It dropped to the ground with a yelp of pain.

An arrow sunk into Lilith's mount and it let out a bestial shriek of pain and staggered to the ground. "Stupid beast," Lilith said, ducking behind it and pulling her helmet back on, "can't even take a single goddamned arrow before collapsing." Another arrow whistled above. Grawl leapt from the trees with hammers and began smashing her minions apart. Their numbers were thinning, but so was Lilith's swarm. Wounded grawl limped and staggered away from the battle.

Paulus was attacked by three different grawl at once, now, and Lilith's minions had all been smashed to pieces. Paulus' wooden shield bent and then shattered beneath their hammer blows. Lilith spoiled the blood of one and it stepped backwards, and Lilith leveled her staff with it to finish the creature off, draining its life away until it collapsed. Paulus saw an opening in one of the remaining grawl and took it, cutting its throat open while ducking beneath the hammer swing of another, but then an arrow caught him in the shoulder and he screamed with pain and dropped to one knee. Lilith sucked in a breath and leapt out from behind her horse, sprinting towards him as the grawl circled the wounded monk.

Lilith's eyes darted up towards the tree where the grawl archer took aim, and focused on its heartbeat. With an evil glare, the grawl's heart skipped a beat and it spasmed suddenly, and then its blood began to run black. The nauseated beast dropped from the trees, and then Lilith was slamming into the remaining grawl with the hammer before it could cave Paulus' skull in. She opened her mouth and bit into its neck, but it tore her off, then howled in pain as Lilith's teeth ripped a small piece of its flesh away. The grawl writhed on the ground, desperately trying to prevent the blood from spurting from its neck.

Paulus rose to his feet, limping from a shattered leg. The grawl archer fired an arrow directly towards Lilith, which struck her directly in the chest, not far from the pendant. Her body seized up and she fell backwards to the ground while Paulus closed with the grawl, grunting with agony from his mauled leg. Darkness clouded the edge of Lilith's vision. "No," she whispered, grasping the shaft with one unsteady hand, "come on." She pulled. Her insides tore a little as the arrow's barbs dug into her innards. "Come _on,_" she demanded, and ripped the arrow free with a gasp of shock. Her blood spilled out of the wound in her chest. Something was leaking inside of her.

She looked around in a daze. Dead grawl surrounded her. She reached towards one feebly, grabbed its shoulder, and with great effort pulled herself to it, but her strength ran out halfway there. She stared at the creature, willing more strength into her limbs, willing it to just roll a few feet closer. Paulus appeared above it, and pulled its wrist to her mouth. She bit deep into its wrist and began drinking from it. Whatever had opened up inside of her was stitching itself back together. By the time the grawl was dry, Lilith's head began to clear, but blood still flowed freely from the hole in her chest.

Another grawl was dragged towards her by Paulus. Lilith crawled towards it and sank her teeth into its neck, closing her eyes with relief as the wound in her chest stitched itself shut. She pulled herself away from the corpse, smiling. "It's never easy, is it?" Lilith asked.

"Wouldn't need you if it was," Paulus said, "the grawl are getting away. We should follow them before they get a headstart."

"Your foot," Lilith said, "my horse. Paulus, this is a _terrible_ idea."

"We'll ride together," Paulus said.

"My swarms is dead, my minions went with it, it'll be _hours_ before they're back," Lilith said, "your shield is splinters, and your leg is about the same, and none of those grawl are undead or otherwise sustained by dark magic, so most of your tricks won't work on them anyway. What exactly is your plan for when we catch them?"

Paulus sighed. "Okay, you're right," he said, "we can't pursue immediately...We need to get to Barradin's Estate. There'll be a healer there, and we can group up with the Duke's men."

"Sounds good to me," Lilith said, pulling herself onto Paulus' horse and gritting her teeth for another agonizing ride, "better than trying to take them all on at once." She looked at the ambush site. "Looks like, what, six or seven dead grawl? Maybe half of them ran away. Fourteen total? That's probably not even _half_ of their total force. If we hit the whole thing, we'd have been dead for sure."

"No sign of the charr that I saw," Paulus said, mounting the horse behind Lilith, "seems like he's probably abandoned the grawl to make trouble here on their own if the grawl are splitting themselves up. Such a small force would be wise to stick together."

"Great," Lilith said, kicking the horse into a canter and immediately hissing with pain as the armor bounced and jostled atop the pendant, "one less thing to worry about."

"Not so," Paulus said, "the charr is still out there somewhere, and if he's no longer with the grawl, he's probably stirring up trouble somewhere else."

It was nearly sunset when they finally reached the estate. An open field nearby the estate showed signs of a large army camped nearby recently, at least a hundred strong, but now there were only the remains of campfires, some litter from careless soldiers the local peasants hadn't yet gotten around to cleaning up, and the vast swaths of trampled grass. "Looks like they moved on without us," Lilith said, half-jumping and half-falling out of the saddle as soon as she arrived at the bridge that led into the estate proper. A pair of armed guards stood with halberds to block the passage of unauthorized visitors. "Maybe you could just write your friend a letter telling him to send a gift basket for the grawl we killed already, and we can just go home," Lilith said, helping Paulus down from his mount. Not that she could _actually_ just go home, because she still had business with Kasha up here.

"Not yet," Paulus said, limping towards the bridge, one leg in a splint, "need to speak with him. It's very important that I speak with him." The guards stepped forward to confront Paulus. "I'm Paulus the Monk, here to see Captain Thom de Minor," Paulus said, "has he informed you of my coming?"

"Wait here, sir," one of the guards said, "I'll go tell the captain you're here to see him." Paulus nodded, the guard jogged across the bridge onto the estate, while his companion remained behind, his expression stoic. Lilith thought she could see a single archer in the watchtower on the other side of the wall, but other than that the estate appeared to be completely unguarded. Most likely the Duke had taken most of his own men-at-arms with him when he rounded up his army to go fight the grawl. Considering how many of his men he'd sent north to Piken Square to try and dislodge the charr, his estate probably wasn't terribly well-guarded before then. Maybe the charr behind the wall was going to try and summon up another army and go around sacking places like this.

"Right," the guard said, returning, "Captain Thom says he'll see you."

"Thank you," Paulus said, and began hobbling across the bridge and beneath the estate's massive gate, leaning on the horse for support. Lilith led the horse across and into the estate. An impressively fortified keep stood squat and powerful behind the walls of the estate, sixteen feet thick and twenty feet high. This wasn't a city estate like the Roblis' or Magi's owned, where the wall was a three-foot symbolic barrier marking the edge of the family's territory. It was a fortress unto itself. If some enemy of Ascalon were other to storm the Great Northern Wall, this fortress is where the defenders of Green Hills County would rally.

"The captain insists on seeing you immediately and alone," the guard said, "in fact, said he didn't want to let that witch of yours in at all, but someone else wants to see her, as it happens."

"Who?" Lilith asked.

"Kasha Blackblood," the guard says, "or so she's called. Hasn't got a proper last name that I know of."

"Kasha? The grave watcher? What's she doing up here?" Lilith asked.

"Came to ask a favor of the Duke, only the Duke's been out, so now she's waiting for him to come back from his grawl hunt," the guard said. "Anyway, Thom's waiting in the gatehouse up them stairs," he pointed to a staircase built on the inside of the gatehouse, "and Kasha said she'd come out here to meet with you when the monk came inside."

"Alright," Lilith said, then glanced to Paulus. "Everything here alright?" she asked.

"It's fine," Paulus said, "no matter how much someone dislikes me, there's not going to be a fight on our hands in the heart of Ascalonian power in the county."

"I thought this Thom was a friend?" Lilith asked.

"He is now," Paulus said, "we'll see how much he likes me after I finish talking."

Lilith shrugged. "So long as it won't be a fight. Especially with you looking like that. Speaking of, is there any chance you'll be getting us thrown out? You should get yourself patched up first if there is."

"Grazden lives in the village anyway," Paulus called over his shoulder as he hobbled towards the gatehouse with the guard's support. Lilith had never heard of Grazden before, but she trusted Paulus knew what he was talking about. Besides his recent plan to hunt down the grawl, he had fairly consistently been right about things.

As Paulus disappeared within the gatehouse, Kasha emerged. She favored heavier armor than Munne, but had no left gauntlet and didn't bother wearing her helmet when in safe territory. The lack of the left gauntlet was doubtless so that she could bleed herself to fuel her blood magic. Kasha's nickname was supposedly due to her having made so many blood pacts with dark creatures that her blood ran permanently black. Considering that's the color of blood that had been spoiled and which the body did its damndest to vomit up, Lilith wasn't sure she believed it.

"So," Kasha said, swaggering up to Lilith, "you're Munne's new protege. The one who takes reports from the ghosts I send."

"I am," Lilith said.

"Lilith de Nemo," Kasha said.

A chill went down Lilith's spine as she heard the name. De Nemo. Heir to nothing. The universal name of the slaves, the people who belonged nowhere and were only here to be killed for fun. The way Rurik had killed her. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone else was within earshot, but the estate courtyard was deserted. "I'm Lilith, yes," she said.

"I hope you last. The ghosts like you," Kasha said, "and you're one of the fastest to learn to see them properly." Kasha turned and began heading for the stairs that led to the top of the wall. "Come," she said, "follow me."

Lilith followed. "Is there any particular reason you wished to speak with me?" she asked.

"I wanted to meet the new apprentice," Kasha said, "we may be colleagues someday, if something untoward should happen to Munne. And even now we are colleagues of a sort. We are both grave watchers, after all."

"Thank you," Lilith said, "I take it you weren't told why I came, then?"

"On one of Paulus' errands," Kasha said, "the arrangement was explained to me through ghost messenger."

"No," Lilith said, "well, yes. But there's another reason. I'm here to help you in the catacombs."

"Help me?" Kasha asked. They had reached the top of the wall now and walked alongside the battlements. "Help me how?"

"Well, at last report you were struggling to fend off gargoyles and Grenth cultists in addition to everything that needs to be taken care of normally in the catacombs," Lilith said, "and...I'm here to help. Orders of Munne."

Kasha stopped and considered Lilith, who looked west towards the horizon. "I suppose Paulus wouldn't have brought you to hunt grawl if you weren't any good in a fight," she said.

"I guess I'm alright," Lilith said, "I'm not fully trained."

"What have you fought?" Kasha asked.

"Skale. Devourers. Bandits. Grawl. Other grawl," Lilith said, "untrained, unarmored, and sometimes barely armed. And I still came out of damn near every fight with snapped bones and cuts. I should be some help against the gargoyles, though."

"I think you overestimate the potence of the cultists," Kasha said, "but a realistic assessment of your capabilities is refreshing. Far too many apprentices think they can take on the world."

"How many of them have nearly been killed," Lilith counted it up in her head, glancing up from the middle distance she'd been staring into, "five times?"

"Are you suggesting I attempt to murder my apprentices in the future?" Kasha asked.

"Only if you're unsuccessful five times in a row," Lilith said, "having your knee smashed, being shot in the chest, poisoned, all by rabble that real warriors can hack through small armies of unscathed, it gives you perspective."

"So how is it you're such a help to Paulus?" Kasha asked.

Lilith shrugged. "Most of his tricks only work against things that run on dark magic. All he's got is a sword and a shield." She thought a moment. "And he _still_ has a kill count on par with mine and usually walks away with fewer injuries. And he doesn't even wear armor." Lilith sighed. "I hope I'm at least good for my age."

"You are," Kasha said. A guard with a torch passed by, lighting the torches along the battlements as she went; night had fallen. "What are you looking at?"

Lilith was looking west. Looking to Rin. The place where everyone knew her face. Knew her name. Being only _half_ the kingdom away wasn't far enough. "Nothing," Lilith said.

Wood splintered. Lilith and Kasha turned to the courtyard, where a guard had just been tossed through a door, and Paulus leapt over him, rolling as he hit the ground and groaning with pain as his splint shattered. Paulus whistled. The horse broke into a gallop and Paulus swung himself up atop it. "Great," Lilith muttered, and sprinted along the wall towards the gatehouse. She took the stairs three at a time. The drawbridge would probably be rising if the estate weren't so horribly undermanned. "Okay," Lilith said, Paulus' mount thundering beneath the gatehouse. She climbed atop a merlon, the horse shot out eighteen feet below, and Lilith leapt from the gatehouse.

She hit the ground and at least had the presence of mind to roll to the impact, rising to her feet as Paulus shot ahead of her, and then dived to the side as a pair of guards shot after him. "I thought it wasn't going to end with a fight," Lilith said, getting to her feet again and dusting herself off.

That's when she was lifted off her feet and onto the back of a horse of pure shadow, eyes burning red. Lilith struggled into her seat behind Kasha. "Do you think I _walked_ here?" Kasha asked over her shoulder while her nightmare steed chewed up the ground beneath them. "What's Paulus got himself into?" Kasha asked.

"No idea," Lilith asked, "why are you helping?"

"I don't waste my breath answering stupid questions," Kasha said, "why are you chasing Paulus?"

"To find out what he's gotten himself into," Lilith said. The mounted guards were not far ahead.

"Why?" Kasha asked.

"What?" was Lilith's only response.

"Why do you care?" Kasha asked, "he was an agreement Munne decided she had to honor, and a sword hanging above _your_ head. He dies, your life is easier. He gets caught, same thing. Why. Do. You. _Care_?"

Lilith had no answer. "I don't know," she admitted.

Kasha groaned with frustration. "If this is some romantic entanglement, I might kill him just to keep you focused." The guards ahead had pulled up their horses and scanned the brush. "Lost him?" Kasha asked.

The two of them looked at one another. "Yeah," one of them admitted, "he was faster than us."

"Nothing's faster than shadow," Kasha said, dismounting. "Whatever your business with this monk is," Kasha said to Lilith, "you had better be alive and not an enemy of the state at the end of it. The nightmare dissolves at sunrise, meet me at the catacombs tomorrow and we'll see what you can do about the gargoyles."

"You were with the monk, weren't you?" the guard asked.

"Reluctantly," Lilith said, "he dragged me into this, said we were hunting grawl, and I _still_ don't have a damn clue what this is _actually_ about. If it's all the same to you, I'd like to get the whole story out of him before you pinch him."

"Find the monk in the woods," Kasha said to the nightmare, and it immediately shot off.

"I'll have him at the catacombs tomorrow at noon," Lilith shouted over her shoulder, "no promises he'll still be alive!"

Lilith was grateful for her mask. She soon left the fields behind, and the branches slapped her face in the dark, but with the leather between her and the stinging wood, she could barely feel it. The nightmare was a perfectly smooth ride, without upsetting her curse at all, and it seemed to know the way. Sure enough, after only a few minutes of hard riding she caught up with Paulus, whose mount was skulking through the thicker parts of the woods. "Paulus," Lilith said, "did that go as planned?"

"Why are you here?" Paulus asked, teeth clenched.

"To ask if that went as planned," Lilith said, "to ask what the Hell is going on here. I mean, this wasn't my problem until you threw a guard through a door, now it's my problem."

"Where did you get that horse?" Paulus hissed.

"Can I ask a question?" Lilith asked.

"You didn't ask enough on the way up?" Paulus asked, "did you tell them? Was this your plan since that first fight with the grawl? Is this where everything about...playing nice came from? All your gratitude?"

"Shut up!" Lilith said, reaching across to grab him by the collar, "_I don't care_, okay? Adelbern sold me! And...You _know_ what Rurik did to me! Whatever conspiracy you're a part of, whatever you're plotting with the prince or _for_ the prince, _I do not give a fuck!_"

Paulus opened his mouth to respond, but then cocked his head to the side. Hoofbeats galloping in their direction. "So what's this?" he asked.

"What happens when you argue in the dark with a hunted fugitive," Lilith said.

Paulus tugged his mount away and tried to kick it into a gallop. It tugged at its reins, tangled in a branch. "Dammit," he said, "I can't see anything!" He fumbled with the reins, trying to disentangle them.

"Come on," Lilith said, grabbing Paulus by the shoulder and trying to yank him onto the nightmare. He moaned with pain as his broken leg twisted in the stirrups and fell to sprawling to the ground. The guard and his mount came crushing through the brush. Lilith leapt from her mount and tackled the guard, sending both of them to the ground. She wrapped an arm around the guard's neck and dragged the both of them to their knees, putting her knife to his throat and covering his mouth with the other.. "Hey, Paulus," she said, wincing as the guard bit into her palm,"remember what you said about not betraying guardsmen? Does it apply to this guy?"

"Kill him!" Paulus said. Lilith slit his throat, and the bite of his jaws went limp. Paulus sucked in a few deep breaths. "You helped me," Paulus said.

"_You_ helped _me_," Lilith said, "we're even. What I said to you last week? It was true."

Paulus pulled the splint on his leg straight with another groan of pain. "Alright," he said, "I believe you."

"You're welcome," Lilith said, climbing back onto the nightmare and offering him a hand up.

"Thank you," Paulus said, taking her hand and carefully climbing onto the mount.

"So, now where do you go?" Lilith asked, "wherever it is it's gotta be close. This thing disappears at sunrise."

Paulus was silent for a while. "I don't know. Can't go to the Abbey. Don't know anyplace else that's safe."

"The catacombs are safe," Lilith said, "the only law down there is the word of the grave watchers. All you have to do is convince Kasha you're more helpful to her alive down there than dead or imprisoned."

"And as a bonus, if we meet her down there and she kills me, you're saved the trouble of burial," Paulus said.

"We'll have to get down below in a hurry," Lilith said, "I told the guards to meet me there and I'd have you, dead or alive."

"This thing is fast, isn't it?" Paulus asked.

"To the catacomb entrance in the north," Lilith said to the beast, "we're going home to Kasha." The nightmare raced across the ground again, hoofbeats silent and chewing up the ground below at twice the speed of a mortal horse.


	12. The Power of Blood

"You're proposing that I care for someone who is _not_ a witch and therefore cannot subsist off of blood for the weeks it will take the bones in his leg heal," Kasha said, "and all the while keep him hidden from the forces of the kingdom which I am sworn to protect from the wrath of the dead because he is a fugitive from justice?"

"His story is that he was framed," Lilith said, "that Thom is the conspirator and he's the one who discovered his secret, not the other way around."

"And you believe him?" Kasha asked.

"Honestly, I don't care," Lilith said, "I wanted an explanation, I got one, I don't know if he's telling the truth or not." This was a bald-faced lie. Paulus had explained to her on the way that the real purpose of the mission was to sound out the Green Hills County for sympathy to the prince over the king. Unfortunately for Paulus, it turned out that Thom didn't take kindly to people even _implying_ a lack of support for the king. Paulus maintained that legally speaking, he'd done nothing wrong that Thom could prove. Unfortunately if Thom had the ear of the Duke as thoroughly as he said he did, it wouldn't really matter. Duke Barradin was powerful enough to order executions of anyone he liked, and only the defense of someone similarly powerful would save him. The prince wasn't going to speak up for someone with as little influence as Paulus.

"Why do you care so little?" Kasha asked, "did you sign up to be a grave watcher for the fame and fortune?"

"Well, compared to cleaning bloodstains out of the Abbey's infirmary wing, the grave watcher lifestyle is pretty glamorous," Lilith said.

"And that's it?" Kasha asked.

"No," Lilith said, "I think the dead deserve better than what they're getting. A lot of them were good people. Did everything right. Some of them never got what they deserved for it, and they're supposed to. That was the point of the catacomb, wasn't it? The Marutuk rewarded their followers, and Thorn would too. But they never really got it since the Sect Wars started and we were never able to win. If I can fix that for even one ghost, that'll be worth it."

Kasha scrutinized Lilith. "Interesting," she said.

"Yes, that sounds kind of like a prepared speech," Lilith said, "it's not like I never thought about this before. Much fun as this interrogation is," Lilith said, "aren't we a little off-track? Are you turning Paulus in or not?"

"What do you want me to do with him?" Kasha asked.

Lilith was quiet a moment. "I don't know or care about his politics," she said, "but he's the reason I'm a grave watcher. I don't want him to end up tortured to death in some big public spectacle. I don't want to see his head on a spike. For whatever my opinion is worth, I think Paulus deserves to live."

"Then I'll keep him alive," Kasha said with a sigh, "this time. Don't expect me to make a habit of harboring fugitives for you, though."

"Thank you," Lilith said.

"Of course," Kasha said as she walked away, "it helps that if I keep him alive I can suck at least a meal a day out of him even if he can't restock."

Lilith licked her lips, thinking of the pair of fang scars on her own wrist. It was irritating having to eat for two, but she didn't blame them for it. _Nothing_ tasted better than human blood.

Despite the gargoyle infestation, the Old Shrines were still Kasha's home. Kasha had left to go wait for the Duke and summon him for reinforcements, so Lilith spent the first few days lugging around a massive tome in which was written the rites for all those honored at the shrines. There were no bones down here, only thousands upon thousands of urns. At each shrine, Lilith would simply list off all of the dozens of names honored there, and light a candle for each of them, and then honor some great event that had occurred to the entire group, before reading the specific rite of a half-dozen or so specific individuals, according to a certain schedule. With so many laid to rest here, it was impossible to honor more than a tiny fraction of them. And the air was thick with wisps and spirits. Fortunately they clustered around their shrines and were polite enough to clear the way to the altar when Lilith entered, otherwise she would be unable to see through the haze of ethereal bodies. When Paulus commented on how empty and lonely the catacombs were, Lilith actually laughed. Empty, no. Lonely, perhaps. She was alone in the crowd, being the only living person there.

Munne had told her via ghost messenger to stay with Kasha until Kasha was satisfied that the latest crisis the northern section of the catacombs had been averted, unless Munne sent specific instruction to the contrary. Kasha, however, had not returned for four days. Paulus' recovery was painfully slow. Even after four days he was still bedridden, and for the first three days Lilith worried what might happen if a gargoyle should stumble across him. Lilith bumped into one at least once an hour since she'd arrived. Having arrived without minions, and having nothing but urns to work with, Lilith had to kill them with her staff and knife early on, but while their rocky hide required incredible effort to split open, they made for _incredible_ minions once properly torn up and stitched back together. War horrors made from gargoyles were far more resilient than the normal kind, and Lilith had hardly had to replace any since she arrived despite the incessant battles.

The only genuinely terrifying fights were when a pack of gargoyles ambushed her. Often enough, the sight of one gargoyle meant others would be nearby. When she saw the one, Lilith would draw her pack of minions around herself, forming a barrier on all sides between herself and whatever other gargoyles may be lurking in the darkness. The first time one had dropped on her from above, she had nearly panicked, but fortunately their durability did not grant them much strength, and she was able to escape its grasp and direct her minions to stab it to death before it managed to do much more than smack her around a bit. Its dull claws had little luck in piercing her armor, fortunately.

Lilith's concerns for Paulus' safety proved to be unfounded, however. Whenever she inquired, Paulus insisted he would be fine if he were attacked. One day, Lilith came back to the shrine that Kasha had made her home in (it was falling into disrepair, and the urns had been relocated to better maintained shrines) to find the smoking husk of a gargoyle in one corner. The charred remains were barely recognizable. There wasn't even enough left to make a minion out of. "Told you I'd be fine," Paulus said. Lilith hadn't even known the gargoyles had enough dark magic in their system to be vulnerable to smites. Paulus said he didn't either, until he met one. Monks could smell dark magic the way witches could see ghosts.

It was the fifth day when Kasha came back, and not alone. Another monk followed her, along with a squad of eight armed guardsmen. Kasha led them across the vast underground chamber towards the shrine where Lilith and Paulus lived. Lilith grabbed her helmet and put it on before leaving to meet them, four war horrors with the stony flesh and reverse-joint legs of gargoyles marching behind her. Here in the catacombs she did not wear the mask as often as up above, but she didn't want anyone seeing the brand behind her ear. "Here to help flush out the cultists?" Lilith asked Kasha, nodding her head towards the guards.

"They are," Kasha said, "and they'd like to be back on the surface before nightfall. Are you ready to move out with them?"

"I am," Lilith said. Even if she wasn't, Paulus was in the shrine, and every second these guardsmen were down here was a second that he might be discovered.

"Good," Kasha said, "everyone follow me! The Mausoleum isn't far."

Lilith walked just behind Kasha. Her minions mingled with Kasha's ahead, forming a massive shield over a dozen strong. Overhead, two eight-legged catacomb prowler minions crawled across the ceiling. The guardsmen took up the flanks, and Grazden walked in the middle, muttering under his breath to maintain various protective enchantments. The gargoyles gave them a wide berth. "Don't drink the blood of the cultists," Kasha said, "they've stolen one of my books of blood magic, and if they've learned its secrets they can turn their blood to acid. It'd kill you." Lilith nodded her understanding.

At the far end of the massive chamber that contained the Old Shrine was the Crusades Corridor. It ran for half a mile to the Crusaders' Mausoleum, lined with thousands of the dead. They gathered in droves to watch the small army marching through, their armor archaic. Hundreds of them gathered to block their passage forward, an ethereal legion whose misty forms stretched as far as Lilith could see, given her suboptimal vantage point. Lilith could see the guardsmen shrinking back from the sides of the corridors where the ghostly legion stood, even though the guards could not see the ghosts.

"Crusaders of ages past!" Kasha announced when the war party entered the corridor, "centuries ago you gave your lives to tame the eastern frontier and subjugate those who worshiped small gods and uncivilized spirits, and here were you buried, within the great afterlife of Thorn! And yet, for weeks, your rites have been disturbed by the cult of Grenth worshipers who defile your final resting place. We, your descendants in Ascalon above, have come to correct this injustice, and restore to you the honor you earned with your deaths!"

For several seconds, nothing happened. The ghosts stared, and Kasha stared back. Then the ghost at their head, a high-ranking officer of some sort, nodded his head and stepped aside. The ghostly sea parted. The war party moved forward again.

The ghosts of the mausoleum were in a sorrier state. Each of them seemed to Lilith to be an officer of some kind. Their armor was a primitive sort of plate, beautifully embellished despite the centuries of decay, and each of them carried a shield with the sigil of a house on it. Lilith could recognize most of them. In fact, she could recognize one as a de Magi. But despite the splendor of their armor, the ghosts stared, drifted about, said nothing as the war party passed through. The Grenth cult must've done something to them to prevent them from harassing them through the night.

The Mausoleum's door was barred shut, but the massive facade of the underground structure had begun to crumble. Kasha directed her prowlers inside. They scraped, fumbled a moment, and then the bar shifted, lifted, was cast aside, and the doors pulled open from within. Three dozen war horrors rushed out to confront them immediately.

Kasha and Lilith's own horrors braced themselves for the impact of the charge, shielding the rest of the war party from the initial attack. The enemy horrors' blades found themselves turned aside by the protective spells of Grazden, while the guardsmen swung around from both sides, shouting battle cries and hacking into the flanks of the minion army.

"Heartbeats," Lilith said to herself, kneeling down to make herself a smaller target and feeling for anything living within the Mausoleum, "the cultists are alive, they've got to have heartbeats, no matter how much they've poisoned their blood." Though they were distant and faint, it wasn't too difficult to pinpoint those beating hearts. They were slower than the adrenaline-fueled pumping of the guardsmen, slower than the furious thumping in her own chest as the battle raged only five feet away, and they were distant, a solid three hundred feet away, on the other side of the Mausoleum. Six of them.

Lilith pulled off her helmet and opened her mouth. The swarm welled up inside her and burst forth from her orifices as usual. Less usual was the primal scream from her throat. She sucked in a deep breath and replaced her helmet as the swarm flew out across the Mausoleum towards the cultists. She just hoped they weren't wearing much armor. It would take the plague locusts half their lifespan just to reach them at this distance.

The minion army was thinning in front of them on both sides. In the chaos of battle, the guardsmen could hardly tell friendly minions from foe, with the exception of Kasha's prowlers, which had been smashed and hacked to pieces within seconds of the battle's start. They were nimble, not durable. Only one of Lilith's own minions had survived the fray. "Come on," she said, "just once, let a _single_ war horror pull through the battle."

Her minion was hacking away at the chest of what she hoped was an enemy minion and not Kasha's, but the guardsmen were charging ahead now, towards the cultists in the back of the Mausoleum. What enemy minions remained chased after them, their fortunately more concerned with their own defense than with picking off fragile enemy casters while they had the chance. Kasha raced after them, slitting her wrists to fuel her blood magic. Names aside, Lilith noted while dashing into the Mausoleum to take cover behind a pillar, Kasha's blood was still red.

Lilith counted the five cultist heartbeats as they quickened, spasmed, and then ceased, one by one. The pounding in her own chest slowly stilled. Lilith poked her head around the corner to see if there were any remnant horrors. Without their masters guiding them, they would kill any living thing they could see, and the guardsmen smashed away at a pair of horrors still walking. Grazden knelt by wounded guardsmen at the entrance to the Mausoleum, his hands glowing with healing light as he sealed up their injuries.

"Well," Lilith said, approaching Kasha, who was rounding up her own remaining minions, "I guess it's a good thing these guys showed up to do my job for me. I don't know what else Munne might have been expecting."

"You sell yourself short," Kasha said, "your swarm killed one of the cultists at the battle's start. A fair chunk of the enemy horrors began attacking friend and foe alike. We would have managed without you, but the battle would've been that much bloodier."

"Oh," Lilith said, "I guess I didn't notice in the fray."

"Don't notice, _know_," Kasha said, "learn to know by instinct the shape of the battle and your place in it. Who needs reinforcing, where the enemy is weak and where they are strong, when the battle is going poorly and it is time to retreat and regroup rather than waste more lives on a meatgrinder. You are a minion master, a commander. You don't have time to think or notice, and you can't afford to fight blind. Don't notice. Be aware. All the time." She took a small hatchet and hacked off the lock on a cheap wooden chest. It looked out of place in the Mausoleum, probably something the cult had brought with them, along with the bedrolls and other litter that came from the crypt having been lived in for a month.

"Okay, but, how can I know things without first noticing them?" Lilith asked.

"Awareness will come with practice and experience," Kasha said, opening the chest, "focus on knowing the tide of battle and in time it will become second nature. You aren't ready to fight on your own until it is."

"Alright," Lilith said.

Kasha removed a leatherbound book and handed it to Lilith. It had no title, but opening it up revealed that the author was Kasha herself. "The book I wrote on blood magic," Kasha explained, "I want you to borrow it."

"Oh," Lilith said, smiling as she leafed through the pages. The book was only about two-thirds full, every page crammed with Kasha's tiny but neat handwriting, along with diagrams, including what looked like a massive index of witch glyphs. Lilith didn't think she recognized even half of them. "Thank you."

"You can only have it under a few conditions, however," Kasha said, "first of all, you never take it out of the chapel. I don't care if your favorite reading spot is ten feet outside it, this book is my life's work and you don't take it anywhere that it could get damaged or lost. It stays in the chapel, and if something unfortunate happens to you, Munne will see that it gets back to me. For the same reason, it's never to so much as share a room with any kind of food or drink."

"Okay," Lilith said, "there's plenty of spare rooms in the chapel where I can keep it safe. Anything else?"

"Yes," Kasha said, "the next time you consider giving shelter to a fugitive just so you can weasel an explanation out of him, _don't_."

"I'm sorry, but what does that have to do with-" Lilith started, but Kasha cut her off.

"If I were your teacher I would simply _command_ you not to do something that stupid again," Kasha said, "but since I'm not, I'm offering you a trade instead. Every secret of blood magic known to the kingdom of Ascalon, and in exchange all you have to do is _not_ jeopardize your entire career as a grave watcher. With our numbers as thin as they are and the training process as dangerous as it is, the very last thing we need is a promising apprentice getting herself killed in a moment of idiocy." Lilith opened her mouth, closed it again, looked down to the book in her hands. "I would rather you take time to think about the implications than answer immediately," Kasha said, taking the book from Lilith and tucking it under her arm. "We need to return to the shrines, think about it on the way."

"Are you going to..." Lilith trailed off. There were plenty of guardsmen within earshot. Details would be excessively unwise. But if Kasha _did_ turn Paulus in...Well, Paulus was her friend. Sort of. Certainly he had been kind to her, and for no other reason except that he thought she deserved it.

"No," Kasha said, "you're part of the catacombs. You're a grave watcher. We look out for one another. So despite how stupid the whole idea was, I'm not going to stab you in the back. You haven't told me why, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it's because you're not sure yourself, but clearly this is important to you, which makes it important to me. But _do not_ make a habit of it."

"Thank you," Lilith said, breathing a sigh of relief. Lilith felt like she should say something more. The words did not come. Kasha nodded her head to Lilith and then turned towards the exit, where Grazden was putting the last of the wounded guardsman into a shape that would be able to walk back to the surface without ripping something open.

Despite the dramatic reduction in minion forces, the war party was still bigger than anything the gargoyles wanted to deal with. Lilith was left alone with her thoughts. Certainly Kasha had a point. Bringing Paulus to the catacombs, asking Kasha to shelter him, it was a risk. If they were found out, this war party would've been sent to kill them. Granted, it might not have worked very well with Kasha on the other side, depending on how able a healer Grazden was, but sooner or later the warband up north would be defeated, the troops would come home, and then the Duke would have plenty of soldiers with which to clean house. And in any case, the Grenth cult would still be operating out of that Mausoleum. Bringing Paulus here had been a risk, and for what?

But what would have happened if she _hadn't_ helped him? He might have been caught. Certainly he would've been much easier to track in daylight, he still had a broken leg, and he'd said himself that he didn't know where he could go for safety. Maybe his head would've ended up piked on the wall of the Barradin Estate. Lilith had gotten a friend murdered once, but everyone made mistakes. A terrible mistake it was, but it had only happened _once_. It wasn't who she was. She had been a noble. She'd kept her word, been loyal to her friends and the true king, at least back when she thought there _was_ a true king. And whatever she was now, it wasn't a lying, cheating, thieving slave. Paulus was a friend.

Lilith was supposed to be a grave watcher. And Kasha, nearly two decades her senior, had told her quite explicitly that what she had done was not good for the grave watchers. Maybe Paulus couldn't be her friend anymore. The catacombs and the Abbey were different places. Lilith knew that, had known it when she was on the other side of the fence. They didn't watch out for each other. They did favors for one another and repaid those favors and always kept score. They were allies. But they weren't _friends_.

The guards and Grazden headed for the surface immediately when they reached the stairs. Kasha turned to Lilith when they had left and said "you should begin your return trip to Munne immediately. Have you made a decision?"

Lilith nodded. "This won't happen again," she said, "I never really thought about it before, but I wouldn't do it again even if you weren't offering me the book. You're right. It isn't smart, and I wasn't thinking."

"Fortunately for you, I wasn't lying when I said I _want_ you to borrow the book," Kasha said, handing it back to Lilith. "Tell Paulus he can't rely on you for help in the future. It's only fair."

Lilith nodded, and entered the shrine. Paulus was still lying in the pile of blankets where he'd been recovering for close to a week now. His head and leg were the only parts of him visible beneath the blankets, the leg in a splint and a makeshift harness Lilith had thrown together. She wasn't sure what keeping the leg off the ground was supposed to do and neither did Paulus, but she knew it was something people did when mending bones the long way. "Paulus," Lilith said, "need to talk to you about the whole...Fugitive thing."

"Would it sound sycophantic if I thanked you again for finding a safe place for me to recover?" Paulus asked.

"No, but you probably won't want to by the time we finish talking," Lilith said.

"What is it?" Paulus asked, his eyes narrowing.

"I didn't turn you in," Lilith said, and Paulus visibly relaxed, "but this isn't happening again. You saved my life. Now I've saved yours. Once that leg of yours heals, you're not my problem anymore."

Paulus glanced away. "I understand," he said.

Kasha had been leaning against the entrance to the door, and now pushed herself off to walk towards the two of them. "And as it happens, healing that leg of yours should only take about ten minutes," she said, "I picked you up a present while I was in town." Kasha tossed a healing signet to Paulus. Powerful healing magic, not fast enough to be usable in combat time, but very valuable to those who expected to be mauled regularly. "I take it you know how to use it?" Kasha asked. Lilith wondered if she should bother learning. It was a complicated glyph, but she seemed to end up wounded somewhat regularly.

"Yes," Paulus said, "with all the time I spend on the frontlines, it was a worthwhile investment of my time." He clasped the ring in his hand and focused, and there was a sickening snapping noise and Paulus grimaced with pain as the bones mended themselves. He stood, limping slightly, but soon steadying as he grew used to his newly mended leg, and offered the signet back to Kasha.

"Keep it," Kasha said, "I can't use it. In any case, I am rarely on the front lines myself."

"Thank you," Paulus said, looking from Kasha to Lilith, "both of you."

"Where will you go?" Lilith asked, stepping out of the shrine and into the main chamber with Paulus.

"I don't know," Paulus said, "but I had better get going there. It seems as though I've worn out my welcome here."

"Be careful," Lilith said, stopping as she reached the stairs to the surface.

"Do you still care?" Paulus asked, stopping a few steps above.

"Yes," Lilith said, "I can't stick my neck out for you again. But I haven't forgotten what you've done for me. Good luck."

"Thanks," Paulus said, "you too." He turned, and ascended the stairs to the surface.


End file.
